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BISlOny 


OF 


PHILOSOPHY, 


FROM THALES TO THE PRESENT TIME. 


BY 


DR. FRIEDRICH UEBERWEG, 


LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KONIGSBERG. 


Translated from the Fourth German Hovition, 


BY 


GEO. S. MORRIS, A.M., 


PROFES50R OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 


With Advitions, 


BY 


NOAH PORTER, D.D., LL.D., 


PRESIDENT OF YALE COLLEGE. 


With a Dretace 


BY THE EDITORS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY. 


VOL, L—HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT AND MEDLEVAL PHILOSOPHY. 





NEW YORK: 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 
1889. 


AUTHORIZED. TRANSLATION, 
REVISED BY THE AUTHOR. 


Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1871, 
By CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 


Trow’s 
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING Co., 
PRINTERS AND BOOKBINDERS, 
205-213 East 12th St., 
NEW YORK. 


PUBLISHERS’ NOTE. 


The wide adoption of Uxrserwee’s History or 
ῬΗΙΠΟΒΟΡΗΥ, as a text book in the higher institutions 
of learning, has induced the publishers to issue the 
work in this smaller and less expensive form, in 
order to bring it more generally within the reach of 


students. 


As now produced the work contains all the matter 


of the original edition. 


PREFACE. 


Dr. UrBERWEG’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, in three parts, 
was first published at Berlin, 1862 to ’66. It met with such approval, not- 
withstanding the competition with other able compends, that the first part 
has already reached a fourth edition (1871). Since Tennemann’s Manual 
(1812, 5th edition by Wend, 1829),* no work has appeared so well adapted 
to meet the wants of students. Indeed, no work on the subject contains 
such a careful collection of authorities and citations, or so full a bibliogra- 
phical apparatus. The opinions of the various schools and their contrasted 
principles, as well as the views of individual philosophers, are presented with 
clearness and precision. This is the great value of the work. It is not writ- 
ten, like some histories of philosophy, to propound or fortify the special 
theories of the author. It shows a full mastery of the whole course of philo- 
sophic thought, with independent investigations and criticisms. The various 
systems are given, as far as possible, in the phraseology of their authors, and 
this imparts variety to the style. It is eminently impartial. 

The undersigned selected it as the best work with which to begin the philo- 
sophical division of their proposed Library, after a full comparison of it with 
other works of its class, and upon consultation with those best qualified to 
Judge about its merits. It is more concise than Ritter’s General History, 
and more full and authentic than Schwegler’s Outline, which was first pre- 
pared for an Encyclopedia. The works of Fries, and Rixner, and Reinhold 
have been supplanted by more recent investigations. Ritter’s History of 
Christian Philosophy (185859), though very valuable, covers only a part 
of the ground, and presupposes some acquaintance with the sources which 
Ueberweg so fully cites. The well-known history of Morell is restricted to 
the later European systems. The able critical histories of modern philoso- 
phy by Erdmann and Kuno Fischer are limited in their range, yet too ex- 
tended for our object. The work with which we most carefully compared 
Ueberweg’s Treatise, was Professor Erdmann’s Compend of the Whole History 


* Translated by Rey. A. Johnson, revised and enlarged by T. R. Morell, London, 
1852, 


vill PREFACE. 


of Philosophy, in two volumes (Berlin, 1866). This is the product of a master 
of philosophic systems, and it is elaborate in method, and finished in style. 
But it is perhaps better fitted to complete than to begin the study of the 
History of Philosophy. Its refined criticisms and its subtle transitions from 
one system to another, presuppose considerable acquaintance with recent Ger- 
man speculations. And Professor Erdmann himself generously expressed to 
Dr. Schaff his appreciation of the special value of Ueberweg’s Manual, say- 
ing that he always kept it before him, and considered it indispensable on 
account of its full literature of the subject. 

This translation of Ueberweg appears under the sanction, and with the 
aid of the author himself. He has carefully revised the proofs, and given to 
our edition the benefit of his latest emendations. He did not survive to see 
the completion of this work; he died, after a painful illness of seven weeks, 
June 7, 1871, at Kénigsberg, while yet in the prime of his career. In re- 
peated letters to Dr. Schaff, who conducted the correspondence with him, he 
has expressed his great satisfaction with this translation, in comparison, too, 
with that of his System of Logic (3d edition, Bonn, 1868), recently issued in 
England.* His friend, Dr. Czolbe, wrote in behalf of his widow, that, “on 
the day of his death, he carefully corrected some of the proof-sheets of this 
translation, and was delighted with its excellency.” 

The work has been translated from the latest printed editions; the First 
Part, on Ancient Philosophy, is from the proof-sheets of the fourth edition, 
just now issued in German. For the Second and Third Parts, special notes, 
modifications, and additions were forwarded by the author. 

At our suggestion, Professor Morris has, in the majority of cases, trans- 
lated the Greek and Latin citations; retaining also the original text, when 
this seemed necessary. A long foot-note, ὃ 74, on the recent German discus- 
sions concerning the date and authorship of the Gospels, which was hardly in 
place in a History of Philosophy, has been omitted with the consent of Dr. 
Ueberweg. 

Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, has examined this translation 
and enriched it by valuable additions, especially on the history of English 
and American Philosophy. 

The first volume, now issued, embraces the first and second parts of the 
original, viz., Ancient and Medieval Philosophy ; the second and last volume 
will contain the history of Modern Philosophy, with a full alphabetical index. 
The sections have been numbered consecutively through both volumes. 


* System of Logic and History of Logical Doctrines. By Dr. FRIEDRICH UEBERWEG, 
Prof. of Phil. in the University of Kénigsberg. Translated from the German, with 
Notes and Appendices, by THOMAS M. Lrnpsay, M.A., F.R.S.E., Examiner in Phi- 
losophy to the University of Edinburgh. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1871. 


PREFACE. ix 


Besides this work, and his System of Logic, Professor Ueberweg was the 
author of a treatise on The Development of Consciousness by Teachers, a 
series of applications of Beneke’s Theory of Consciousness, in didactic rela- 
tions (Berlin, 1853); Investigations on the Genwineness and Order of the 
Platonic Writings, including a sketch of the Life of Plato,—a volume 
crowned by the Imperial Academy of Vienna, 1861; De Priore et Posteriore 
Forma Kantiane Critices Rationis Pure, a pamphlet published at Berlin, 
in 1862. The later labors of his life were chiefly given to his History of 
Philosophy. In 1869 he published in J. H. von Kirchmann’s Philosophi- 
sche Bibliothek, an excellent German translation of Bishop Berkeley’s treatise 
on the “ Principles of Human Knowledge,” with critical notes and illustra- 
tions. This was, in part, the result of an animated metaphysical discussion ; 
for there are even now German as well as English advocates of the intense 
Subjectivism of Berkeley. The two chief philosophical journals of Germany 
have entered into this controversy, which was begun by a work of Collyns 
Simon, LL.D., entitled The Nature and Elements of the Hxternal World, 
or Universal Immaterialism, London, 1862, in which Berkeley’s theory was 
acutely advocated. Dr. Ueberweg replied to it in Fichte and Ulrici’s Zeit- 
schrift fiir Philosophie, Bd. 55, and Prof. Dr. von Reichlin-Meldegg of 
Heidelberg in the same journal, Bd. 56, 1870. Dr. Simon’s rejoinder ap- 
peared, with comments by Ulrici, in the same volume. In Bergmann’s 
Plalosophische Monatshefte, Bd. v., May, 1870, Simon, Hoppe, and 
Schuppe in three articles controverted Ueberweg’s positions; his reply ap- 
peared in August, with a rejoinder by Schuppe, February, 1871. In this 
controversy Dr. Ueberweg showed a full mastery of the subject. In Fichte’s 
Zeitschrift, Bd. 57, 1870, he continued his investigations upon the Order of 
the Platonic Writings, by replying to Brandis and Steinhart, who had eriti- 
cised his views.* Such high-toned discussions contribute to the progress of 
thought and knowledge. 

Friedrich Ueberweg was born January 22, 1826, the son of a Lutherau 
clergyman near Solingen in Rhenish Prussia. His excellent mother was early 
left a poor widow, and devoted herself to her only son till her death in 1868. 
He was educated in the College at Elberfeld and the Universities of Gottin- 
gen and Berlin, and attained to extraordinary proficiency in philosophy, phi- 
lology, and mathematics. In 1852 he commenced his academic career as 
Privatdocent in Bonn, and in 1862 he was called as Professor of Philosophy 
to the University of Kénigsberg. There he labored with untiring industry 
till last summer, when (inthe forty-sixth year of his age) he died in the midst 


* This essay is entitled: Ueber den Gegensatz zwischen Methodikern und Geneti 
kern und dessen Vermittelung bei dem Problem der Ordnung der Schriften Plato's. 


Χ PREFACE, 


of literary plans for the future, leaving a widow and four children and many 
friends and admirers to mourn his loss. He was a genuine German scholar, 
and ranked with the first in his profession. His History of Philosophy and 
his Logic will perpetuate his name and usefulness.* 

Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy, while complete in itself, also forms a 
part of a select Theological and Philosophical Library, which the under- 
signed projected some years, since, and now intend to issue as rapidly as is 
possible with so large an undertaking. A prospectus of the whole accom- 
panies the present volume. 

Henry B. SmitH and PHILip ScHAFF, 

New York, Oct. 18, 1871. Editors. 


* Compare the fine tribute to his memory by his friend, Professor Fr. A. Lange, of 
Zurich: Friedrich Ueberweg, Berlin, 1871. Also Dilthey: Zum Andenken an Fried. 
Ueberweg, in the ‘‘ Preuss. Jahrbiicher” for Sept. 1871, pp. 309-822 ; and Adolf Lasson : 
Zum Andenken an Κ΄, U., in Dr. Bergmann’s ‘‘ Philos, Monatshefte,” vol. vii., No. 7, 
and separately published, Berlin, 1871. 


OF THE CONCEPTION, 


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§ 13 


CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 


INTRODUCTION. , 


TOGETHER WITH THE LITERARY HELPS. 


. The Conception of Philosophy 

. The Conception of History 

. The Methods of Historical ΤΠ πὶ : 
. Sources and Aids . 


Li 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTIQUITY. 


. General Character of Pre-Christian Antiquity and te ee? 
. Oriental Philosophy . δα αὐ b.%¢ δ δ 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS. 


. Sources and Aids for Greek Philosophy - - 
. Beginnings of Greek Philosophy in Greek Poetry a Peovarbial "Wisdom 
9. Periods of Development of Greek Philosophy 


FIRST PERIOD OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 


PRE-SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY, OR PREVALENCE OF COSMOLOGY. 


. Fourfold Division of the First Period . 


FIRST DIVISION: THE EARLIER IONIC NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 


. The Earlier Ionic Natural Philosophers 
. Thales of Miletus and Hippo . 
. Anaximander of Miletus 


METHOD, AND GENERAL SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, 


14 
14-17 


18-24 
24-26 
26-29 


29-32 


ΧΠ 


§ 14. 
§ 15. 


§ 25. 


CONTENTS. 


Anaximenes of Miletus and Diogenes of Apollonia ἘΠῚ 
Heraclitus of Ephesus and Cratylus of Athens. . ..... 


SECOND DIVISION: PYTHAGOREANISM. 


. Pythagoras of Samos and the Pythagoreans. . . .. ., 


THIRD DIVISION: THE ELEATIC PHILOSOPHY. 


The Eleatic Philosophers 
Xenophones of Colophon 


. Parmenides of Elea 


ZENO Olea les ee eee ape τις 


. Melissus of Samos 


FOURTH DIVISION: LATER NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 


. The Later Natural Philosophers . 

. Empedocles of Agrigentum 

Anaxagoras and Hermotimus of (iromenes ΠΕ ΞΕ of Miletis, «πᾶ 
Metrodorus of Lampsacus : 

The Atomists: Leucippus and meyeanean 


SECOND PERIOD OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 


PAGE 
37-38 


38-42 


42-49 


49-51 
51-54 
54-57 
57-59 
59-60 


60 
60-63 


63-67 
67-71 


FROM THE SOPHISTS TO THE STOICS, EPICUREANS, AND SKEPTICS, OR PERIOD OF THE FOUND- 
ING AND PREDOMINANCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SCIENCE OF THE THINKING AND 
WILLING SUBJECT (LOGIC AND ETHICS), ACCOMPANIED BY A RETURN TO PHYSICS. 


-1 


WW? τῶν 2 0 οϑὺ σὺ 
ww ὦ τῷ pw τῷ 
Θ 


τ 8) 


Nw re 


. The Three Divisions of the Second Period 


FIRST DIVISION: THE SOPHISTS. 


. The Sophistic Philosophy 


Protagoras of Abdera. 
Gorgias of Leontiui 


. Hippias of Elis . 


Prodicus of Ceos 
The Later Sophists 


71-72 


72-73 
73-76 
16-77 
77-78 

78 
79-80 


SECOND DIVISION: GREEK PHILOSOPHY FROM SOCRATES TO ARISTOTLE INCLUSIVE. 


3. Socrates of Athens . 

. The Disciples of Socrates ; 

5. Euclid of Megara and his School . 

. Phedo of Elis, Menedemus of Eretria, πὶ ΠΝ ‘Schools 
. Antisthenes of Athens and the Cynic School . 


80-88 
88-89 
88-91 

91 
92-94 


CONTENTS. xii 

PAGE 

§ 38. Aristippus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaic or Hedonic School . . . 95-98 
EIEN he tk ts lee aheey an, Rye are Paty ee 98-104 
$40. Plato’s Writings 104-115 
§ 41. Plato’s Divisions of Philosophy and his Dialectic 115-123 
8. 42. Plato’s Natural Philosophy . 123-128 
§ 43. Plato’s Ethics : 128-132 
§ 44. The Old, Middle, and Mew iNenderies - 133-137 
§ 45. Aristotle’s Life . εν ἐφ a fae ds ead eC Ae 137-139 
§ 46. Aristotle’s Writings . . Welded ates aul Sar Paid 0 139-151 
§ 47. Aristotle’s Divisions of Phildeophy ἜΤ ve fogs eve ἢ Vs ole tc 151-157 
§ 48. Aristotle’s Metaphysics or First Philosophy . 157-163 
§ 49. Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy 163-169 
§ 50. The Aristotelian Ethics and Atsthetics . 169-180 
§ 51. The Peripatetics 180-185 

THIRD DIVISION: STOICISM, EPICUREANISM, AND SKEPTICISM. 

§ 52. The Leading Stoics 185-191 
8 53. The Stoic Division of Philosophy ard the Stoic Thome 191-193 
§ 54. The Physics of the Stoics 194-197 
§ 55. The Stoic Ethics 197-200 
§ 56. The Epicureans . 201-203 
§ 57. The Epicurean Division of Philosophy, aad he Gann of the Hpreumene! 203-205 
§ 58. Epicurean Physics. 205-208 
§ 59. Epicurean Ethics . 208-212 
§ 60. Skepticism Fay op 212-217 
§ 61. Eclecticism. ἘΣ toro. eth ΕΞ ΠΕ Ἀν Se ee ec ἀν τς er 217-222 
THIRD PERIOD OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 

THE NEO-PLATONISTS AND THEIR PREDECESSORS, OR PREDOMINANCE OF THEOSOPHY. 

§ 62. Divisions of the Third Period . 229-2993 
FIRST DIVISION: JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

§ 63. Aristobulus and Philo 223-232 
SECOND DIVISION: NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM AND ECLECTIC PLATONISM. 

§ 64. The Neo-Pythagoreans 232-234 
§ 65. The Eclectic Platonists . 234-238 
THIRD DIVISION: NEO-PLATONISM. 

§ 66. The Neo-Platonists ee 238-239 
§ 67. Ammonius Saccas and his ΤΥ ΤΥ Disciples. roma the Eclectic 239-240 


CONTENTS. 


. Plotinus, Amelius and Porphyry . 
. Jamblichus and the Syrian School : 
. The Athenian School and the later Neo- Platonic Damen 


11. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA 


General Character of the Philosophy of the Christian Era . 


. Periods of Christian Philosophy . 


FIRST PERIOD.—PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 


. Principal Divisions of the Patristic Philosophy . Moe onc 
. The Christian Religion. Jesus and his Apostles. The New Testament 
. Jewish and Pauline Christianity . So δ᾽ 6 es nya. ic 


PAGE 


240-252 
252-254 
255-259 


261 
261-262 


263-271 
264-271 
271-274 


FIRST DIVISION: THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY UNTIL THE COUNCIL OF NICE. 


. The Apostolic Fathers 

. The Gnostics 

. Justin Martyr ‘ 
. Tatian, Athenagoras, Mheophalite ona ints ᾿ 
. Irenzus and Hippolytus 

. Tertullian . 

. Monarchianism, Aginnian al Sxtanainnian 

. Clement of Alexandria and Origen . 

. Minutius Felix, Arnobius, and Lactantius . 


mp τῷ τῷ 
co CO 


299-303 
303-306 
306-311 
311-319 
319-325 


SECOND DIVISION: THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COUNCIL OF NICE. 


. Gregory of Nyssa and other Disciples of Origen 
. Saint Augustine : ΠΧ ΕΣ 
. Greek Fathers after ἘΝ ΠΣ 8 Time : 

. Latin Fathers after Augustine’s Time 


SECOND PERIOD.—THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. 


§ 89. Definition and Divisions of the Scholastic Philosophy 


§ 90. 
§ 91. 


§ 92. 


FIRST DIVISION: THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHOLASTICISM. 


Johannes Scotus (Erigena) . 


Realism and Nominalism from the ninth anti near ans ea of the eleventh 


century 
Roscellinus, the Nensnglish ana William of Ghanipesux ‘the Realist 


325-333 
333-346 
347-352 
352-355 


355-377 


358-365 


365-371 
811-211 


C02 C2 C2 CO? CP 


SECOND DIVISION : 


§ 98. 
§ 99. 
§ 100. 
§ 101. 
8.102. 
§ 103. 
§ 104. 
Ε 105. 
§ 106. 


93. 
94. 
95. 
96. 
91. 


CONTENTS. 


Anselm of Canterbury . 


Abelard and other Scholastics aid ΤΕΣ of the twelfth er 


Greek and Syrian Philosophers of the Middle Ages . 
Arabian Philosophy in the Middle Ages . : 
The Philosophy of the Jews in the Middle Ages . 


The Revolution in the Scholastic Philosophy about a. ἢ. 1200 


Alexander of Hales and contemporary Scholastics: Bonaventura, the Mystic 


Albertus Magnus 


Thomas of Aquino and the mbes sett hee nah is, vs 
Johannes Duns Scotus and the Scotists. . . . . . . 
Contemporaries of Thomas and of Duns Scotus . . . 


William of Occam, the Renewer of Nominalism 
Later Scholastics previous to the Renewal of Platonism 


German Mysticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 


Tauler, and others 


SePUGRMIONTME MMs o's; 5,703) 's| ον ως ὦ ς 


Eckhart, 


xv 


PAGE 
377-386 


386-402 
402-405 
405-417 
417-428 


THE FULL DEVELOPMENT AND DOMINATION OF SCHOLASTICISM. 


429-432 
433-463 
436-440 
440-452 
452-457 
457-460 
460-464 
464-467 


467-484 





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ΓΉΥΊ, 


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σους ΦΑΣΙΝ whe ry 


bOI ΤΣ 








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ἴων ᾿ ΤΉΝ Ἴων, 
ὙΝ 


ἜΣΤΙΝ 





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᾿ 
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{ ἶ 
᾿ ᾿ i ὶ |! ‘ 
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4 


ἘΙΘΡΟΒῪ OF PHILOSOPHY. 





INTRODUCTION. 


OF THE CONCEPTION, METHOD, AND GENERAL SOURCES OF THE HISTORY 
OF PHILOSOPHY, TOGETHER WITH THE LITERARY HELPS. 


§ 1. Puimosopay as a conception, historically, is an advance upon, 
as it is an outgrowth from, the conception of mental development in 
general and that of scientific culture in particular. The conception is 
ordinarily modified in the various systems of philosophy, according to 


the peculiar character of each; yet in all 4 them philosophy is included 
under the generic notion of Wi ce, and, as a rule, is distinguished 
from the remaining sciences by the specific difference, that it is not 
occupied, like each of them, with any special, limited province of 
things, nor yet with the sum of these provinces taken in their full 
extent, but with the nature, laws, and connection of whatever ac- 
tually is. With this common and fundamental characteristic of the 


various historical conceptions of philosophy corresponds our definition : 
Philosophy is the science of principles. 


On the conception of philosophy οἵ, the author's article in the Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und philoso- 
phische Kritik, ed. by Imm. Herm. Fichte, Ulrici, and Wirth, New Series, vol. xlii., Halle, 1863, pp. 185-199 ; 
also, among others. C. Hebler, in No. 44 of Virchow and von Holtzendorf’s Sammlung gemeinverstand- 
licher wissensch. Vortrdge, and Ed. Zeller, Akadem. Rede, Heidelberg, 1868. The historical development 
of the conception of philosophy and the various meanings of the word are specially treated of by R. Haym, 
in Ersch and Gruber’s Encycl. der Wias. τι. Kiinste, 111. 24, Leipsic, 1848; and by Eisenmann in his 
Ueber Begriff wnd Bedeutung der σοφία bis anf Sokrates, Progr. of the Wilh.-Gymn., Munich, 1859; 
ef. Ed. Alberti, on the Platonic Conception of Philosophy, in the Zettschr. f. Philos., New Series, vol. li., 
Halle, 1867, pp. 29-52, 169-204. 


The word philosophy (φιλοσοφία, love of wisdom) and its cognates do not occur in 
Homer and Hesiod. Homer uses σοφίη, the second word in the compound (Jl. XV. 412) 
with reference to the carpenter’s art. In like manner, Hesiod speaks of one who is 
ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος (Op. 651). Later writers use σοφία also for excellence in music and 
poetry. With Herodotus any one is σοφός who is distinguished from the mass of men by 
any kind of art or skill. The so-called seven wise men are termed by him σοφισταί, 
“ sophists” (I. 30 ef al.), and the same designation is given by him to Pythagoras (IV. 95). 

1 


2 THE CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY. 


The compounds φιλοσοφεῖν and φιλοσοφία are first found in Herodotus. In Herod. I. 30, 
Croesus says to Solon: “I have heard that thou φελοσοφέων hast traveled over many lands 
for the purpose of observing ;” ibid. I. 50, φιλοσοφία is applied to the knowledge of the stars. 
Thucydides represents Pericles as saying in the Funeral Oration (II. 40): φιλοκαλοῦμεν 
μετ᾽ εὐτελείας καὶ φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας, where φιλοσοφεῖν (philosophizing) signifies the 
striving after intellectual and, more especially, after scientific culture. Thus is confirmed 
for this period the allegation of Cicero: ‘* Omnis rerwm optimarum cognitio atque in iis 
exercitatio philosophia nominata est.” This more general signification, in which the 
“philosopher” is identified with him who μετείληφε παιδείας διαφόρου καὶ περιττῆς, or Who 
is educated above the mass of men, was long afterward retained by the word side by side 
with that given to it as a term of art. 

Pythagoras is cited as the first to designate by the word φιλοσοφία philosophy as 
science. The statement in regard to this point, which we find in Cicero (TZuse. V. 3), 
Diogenes Laértius (I 12, VIII. 8), and others, and which (according to Diog. L. VIII. 8), 
was also contained in a work (d:adoyai), now no longer extant, written by Sosicrates of 
Alexandria, is derived from Heraclides of Pontus, a scholar of Plato. Cicero represents 
Pythagoras as saying, in a conversation with Leon, the ruler of Phlius: ‘ Raros esse quosdam, 
qui ceteris omnibus pro nihilo habitis rerum naturam studiose intuerentur : hos se appellare 
sapientiae studiosos (id est enim philosophos).” Diog. Laért. (I. 12) adds, as the reason 
given by Heraclides for this designation, ‘that no man, but only God, is wise.” Whether 
the narrative is historically true, is uncertain; Meiners (Gesch. der Wiss. in Griech. uw. 
Rom. I. 119), and more recently Haym (in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgem. Encycl. der Wiss. 
u. Kinste, Leips. 1848, ITIL. 24, p. 3), Zeller (Philos. der Griechen, 3d ed., Vol. I., 1856, p. 1), 
and others have doubted it; probably it is only a Socratic and Platonic thought (see 
below) transferred by Heraclides to Pythagoras (perhaps as a poetic fiction, which sub- 
sequent writers took to be historical), The modest disclaimer of Socrates in regard 
to the possession of wisdom, and the preference given by Plato and Aristotle to pure 
theory above all praxis and even above all ethico-political activity, are scarcely in accord 
with the unbroken confidence of Pythagoreanism in the power of scientific investigation 
and with the undivided unity of the theoretical and practical tendencies of that philosophy. 
The natural philosophers who call the universe κόσμος (which, according to Diog. Laért. 
VIIL 48, the Pythagoreans were the first to do), are in Xenophon (Memor. I. 1. 11) called 
σοφισταί, in Plato (Gorg., p. 508 a, ed. Steph.), ‘wise men” (σοφοῖ), without the least intima- 
tion that the Pythagoreans would themselves have desired to be named, not wise, but 
lovers of wisdom. It is also noticeable, though without demonstrative force, that in the 
preserved fragments of the probably spurious work ascribed to Philolaus the Pythagorean 
and devoted to the description of the astronomical and philosophical knowledge of the 
order which reigns in the universe, σοφία, not φιλοσοφία, is used (Stob. Zel. I. 23; ef. Boeckh, 
Philelaos, pp. 95 and 102 f.) 

Socrates calls himself in the Banquet of Xenophon (I. 5) a laborer in philosophy 
(αὐτουργὸς τῆς φιλοσοφίας), in contrast to Callias, a disciple of the Sophists. In the Memora- 
bilia σοφία is found often, φιλοσοφία rarely. According to Xenoph. Mem. IV. 6. 7, σοφία is 
synonymous with ἐπιστήμη (science). Human wisdom is patchwork; the gods have re- 
served what is greatest to themselves (ibid. and I. 1.8). We may ascribe this thought 
with all the more confidence to the historical Socrates, since it reappears in the Apologia 
of Plato (pp. 20 and 23 of the edition of Stephanus, whose paging accompanies most later 
editions), where Socrates says, he may perhaps be wise (σοφός) in human wisdom, but this 
is very little, and in truth only God can be called wise. In the Platonic Apologia Socrates 
interprets (p. 25) the declaration of the oracle in reply to Cherephon, that “no one was 


THE CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY. 3 


wiser than Socrates,” as teaching that he among men was wisest who, like Socrates, dis- 
claimed the possession of any wisdom of his own (ὅτε οὗτος. . . σοφώτατός ἐστιν͵ ὕστις 
ὥσπερ Σωκράτης ἔγνωκεν, ὅτι οὐδενὸς ἄξιός ἐστι τῇ ἀληϑείᾳ πρὸς σοφίαν) ; he calls (p. 28 sq.) 
that examination of himself and others by which he broke up the shameful self-deception 
of those who, without knowing, supposed themselves to know, his “ philosophizing,” and 
sees in it the mission of his life (φιλοσοφοῦντά pe δεῖν ζῆν καὶ ἐξετάζοντα ἐμαυτόν τε Kai 
τοὺς ἄλλους). Since the wisdom of Socrates was the consciousness of not knowing, and 
not the consciousness of a positive, gradual approximation to the knowledge of truth, it 
was impossible that φιλοσοφία, in distinction from σοφία, should become fixed in his termi 
nology as a technical term; so far as wisdom seemed to him attainable, he could make use 
as well of the words σοφός and σοφία (ἀνθρωπίνη) to express it. In the Apologia Socrates ap- 
plies the terms σοφούς and φιλοσοφοῦντας to earlier thinkers, the former rather in an ironical 
-sense (especially so, to the Sophists), but the latter more seriously (Apol., p. 23). Yet it 
remains uncertain whether Plato, in his Apologia (which appears to reproduce with fidelity 
the essential parts of the actual defense of Socrates), confined himself in every particular 
to the exact form of speech adopted by the historical Socrates. With the disciples of 
Socrates φιλοσοφία appears already as a technical designation. Xenophon (Memor. I. 1, 19) 
speaks of men, who asserted that they philosophized (φάσκοντες φιλοσοφεῖν) ; by whom a 
Socratic school—the school of Antisthenes—is probably to be understood. 

Plato expresses in various places (Phedr. p. 278d, Conviv. p. 203 e; cf. Lysis, p. 218 a, 
ed. Steph.) the sentiment ascribed by Heraclides of Pontus to Pythagoras, that wisdom 
belongs only to God, while it belongs to man to be rather a lover of wisdom (¢:Adcogoc). 
In the Convivium (and the Lysis) this thought is developed to the effect that neither he 
who is already wise (σοφός), nor he who is unlearned (ἀμαθής), is a philosopher, but he who 
stands between the two. The terminology becomes most distinct and definite in two 
dialogues of late origin, probably composed by one of Plato’s disciples, namely, in the 
Sophistes (p. 217 a) and the Politicus (p. 257 a, Ὁ), where the Sophist, the statesman, and the 
philosopher (ὁ σοφιστής, ὁ πολιτικός, and ὁ φιλόσοφος) are named in the preceding order, as the 
advancing order of their rank. Wisdom itself (σοφία), according to Plato (Theaetet. p. 145 e), 
is identical with ἐπιστήμη (true knowledge), while philosophy is termed in the dialogue 
Euthydemus (p. 288 4) the acquisition of such knowledge (κτῆσις ἐπιστήμης). Knowledge 
(ἐπιστήμη) respects the ideal, as that which truly is, while opinion or representation (δόξα) 
is concerned with the sensuous, as with that which is subject to change and generation (Hep. 
VY. p. 477 a). Accordingly Plato defines (Rep. 480 Ὁ) those as philosophers, ‘‘ who set their 
affections on that, which in each case really exists” (τοὺς αὐτὸ ἄρα ἕκαστον τὸ ὃν ἀσπαζομένους 
φιλοσόφους κλητέον), or (Rep. VI. 484 ἃ) who ‘‘are able to apprehend the eternal and immu- 
table” (φιλόσοφοι of τοῦ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχοντος δυνάμενοι ἐφάπτεσϑαι). In a wider 
sense Plato uses the term philosophy so as to include under it the positive sciences also 
(Theaet. p. 143d): περὶ γεωμετρίαν ἢ τινα ἄλλην φιλοσοφίαν. 

We find also the same double sense in Aristotle. φιλοσοφία in the wider signification 
(Metaph. VI. 1, p. 1026a, 18 ed. Bekker et al.)—for which σοφία but rarely occurs (Mei. 
IV. 3, p. 1006 Ὁ, 1: ἐστί δὲ σοφία τις Kai ἡ dvotKy, ἀλλ᾽ ov πρώτη, cf. Met. XI. 4, 1061}, 
32)—is science in general and includes mathematics and physics, and ethics and poetics. 
But πρώτη φιλοσοφία, or ‘first philosophy ἡ (Met. VI. 1, 1026 a, 24 and 30; XI. 4, 1061 b, 
19), which Aristotle also calls σοφία, and which he indicates as pre-eminently the science 
of the philosopher (ἡ τοῦ φιλοσόφου ἐπιστήμη, Met. IV. 3, p. 1005 a, 21; ef. φιλοσοφία, Met. 
XI. 4, 1061 b, 25), is in his system that which we now term metaphysics, namely, the 
science of being as such (τὸ ὃν 7 ὄν, Met. VI. 1, 1026a, 31; οὗ XI. 3, 1060}, 31, and 
XI. 4, 1061 Ὁ, 26), and not of any single department of being—the science, therefore, 


4 THE CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY. 


which considers the ultimate grounds or principles of every thing that exists (in particular, 
the matter, form, efficient cause, and end of every thing). Met. I. 2, 982 Ὁ, 9: det γὰρ ταύτην 
(τὴν ἐπιστήμην) τῶν πρώτων ἀρχῶν καὶ αἱτιῶν εἶναι ϑεωρητικῆν. In contrast with this “ first 
philosophy,” the special sciences are termed (in Met. IV. 1, 1003 a, 22) partial sciences 
(ἐτιστῆμαι ἐν μέρει λεγόμεναι). The plural φιλοσοφίαι is used by Aristotle sometimes in the 
sense of “philosophical sciences” (Met. VI. 1, 1026a, 18, where mathematics, physics, 
and theology are named as the three “theoretical philosophies ;” ef. Ethic. Nicomach. I. 4, 
1096 b, 31, where from ethics another branch of philosophy, ἀλλη φιλοσοφία, is distinguished, 
which from the context must be metaphysics), and sometimes in the sense of ‘“ philosophi- 
cai directious, systems, or ways of philosophizing” (Met. I. 6, 987 a, 29: pera δὲ τὰς 
εἰρημένας φιλοσοφίας ἡ Πλάτωνος ἐπεγένετο πραγματεία). 

The Stoics (according to Plutarch, De Plac. Philos. 1., Prooem.) defined wisdom (σοφία) as 
the science of divine and human things, but philosophy (φελοσοφία) as the striving after 
virtue (proficiency, theoretical and practical), in the three departments of physics, ethics, 
andlogic. Cf. Senec. Hpist. 89,3: Philosophia sapientiae amor et affectatio ; ibid. 7: philosophia 
studium virtutis est, sed per ipsam virtutem. The Stoic definition of philosophy removes the 
boundary which in Plato separates ideology, in Aristotle “ first philosophy,” from the other 
branches of philosophy, and covers the case of all scientific knowledge, together with its 
relations to practical morality. Still, positive sciences (as, notably, grammar, mathematics, 
and astronomy) begin with the Stoics already to assume an independent rank. 

Mpicurus declared philosophy to be the rational pursuit of happiness (Sext. Empir. Ad», 
Math. XI. 169: ᾿Επέκουρος ἔλεγε τὴν φιλοσοφίαν ἐνέργειαν εἶναι λόγοις καὶ διαλογισμοῖς τὸν 
εὐδαίμονα βίον περιποιοῦσαν). 

Since all subsequent definitions of philosophy until the modern period were more or 
less exact repetitions of those above cited and hence may here be omitted, we pass on to 
the definition which was received in the school of Leibnitz and Wolff. Christian Wolff 
presents (Philos. Rationalis, Disc. Praelim., § 6), the following as a definition originating with 
himself: (Cognitio philosophica est) cognitio rationis eorum, quae sunt vel fiunt, unde intelligatur, 
cur sint vel fiant; (ibid. § 29): philosophia est scientia possibilium, quatenus esse possunt. This 
definition is obviously cognate with the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions, in so far as it 
makes philosophy conversant with the rational grounds (ratio) and the causes, through 
which existing objects and changes become possible. It does not contain the restriction to 
first causes, and hence Wolff’s conception of philosophy is the wider one; but it fails, on 
the other hand (as do Plato and Aristotle, when they use φιλοσοφία in the broader signifi- 
cation as synonymous with ἐπιστήμη) to mark the boundaries between philosophy and the 
positive (in particular, the mathematical) sciences. In this latter particular Kant seeks to 
reach a more accurate determination. 

Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Doctrine of Method, chap. 3) divides knowledge in general, 
as to its form, into historical (cognitio ex datis), and rational (cognitio ex principiis), and the 
latter again into mathematical (rational cognition through the construction of concepts), 
and philosophical (rational cognition through concepts as such). Philosophy, in its scho- 
lastic signification, is defined by him as the system of all the branches of philosophical 
knowledge, but in its cosmical signification, as the science of the relation of all knowledge 
to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae). 

Herbart (Introd. to Philos., § 4 f.) defines philosophy as the elaboration of conceptions. 
This elaboration comprehends the three processes of the analysis, the correction and the 
completion of the conceptions, the latter process depending on the determination of their 
rank and value. This gives, as the leading branches of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, 
and xsthetics. (Under esthetics Herbart includes ethics, as well as esthetics in the nar- 


HISTURICAL METHODS. 5 


rower and popular signification of the word. What Herbart understands by esthetics 
might be expressed by the word Timology, a term, however, which he never employs.) 

According to Hegel, for whose doctrine Fichte, in respect of form, and Schelling, in 
respect of matter, prepared the way, philosophy is the science of the absolute in the form 
of dialectical development, or the science of the self-comprehending reason. 

The definition of philosophy given by us above meets the case even of those schools 
which declare the principles of things to be unknowable, since the inquiry into the 
cognoscibility of principles evidently belongs to the science of principles, and this science 
accordingly survives, even when its object is reduced to the attempt to demonstrate the 
incognoscibility of principles. 

Such definitions as limit philosophy to a definite province (as, in particular, the 
definition often put forward in recent times, that philosophy is “the science of spirit”), 
fail at least to correspond with the universal character of the great systems of philosophy 
up to the present time, and can hardly be assumed as the basis of an historical exposition. 


§ 2. History in the objective sense is the process by which nature 
and spirit are developed. History in the subjective sense is the in- 
vestigation and statement of this objective development. 


The Greek words ἱστορία and ἱστορεῖν, being derived from εἰδέναι, signify, not history in 
the objective sense, but the subjective activity involved in the investigation of facts. The 
German word Geschichte involves a reference to that which has come to pass (das Gesche- 
hene), and has therefore primarily the objective signification. Yet, not all that has actually 
taken place falls within the province of history, but only that which is of essential signifi- 
cance for the common development. Development may be defined as the gradual realiza- 
tion, in a succession of phenomena, of the essence of the subject of development. As to 
its form, development generally begins through the evolution of contraries or oppositions, 
and ends in the disappearance and reconciliation of these contraries in a higher unity (as 
sufficiently illustrated, for example, in the progressive development which shows itself in 
Socrates, his so-called “ one-sided disciples,” and Plato). 

Through the study of history the whole life of the race is, in a manner, renewed on a 
reduced scale in the individual. The intellectual possessions of the present, like its mate- 
rial possessions, repose in all cases on the acquisitions of the past; every one participates, 
to a degree, in this common property, even without having a comprehensive knowledge of 
history, but each one’s gain becomes all the more extensive and substantial the more this 
knowledge is expanded and deepened. Only that productive activity which follows upon 
a self-appropriating reproduction of the mental labor of the past, lays the foundation for 
true progress to higher stages. 


§ 3. The methods of treating history (divided by Hegel into the 
naive, the reflecting, and the speculative) may be classed as the 
empirical, the critical, and the philosophical, according as the simple 
collocation of materials, the examination of the credibility of tradi- 
tion, or the endeavor to reach an understanding of the causes and 
significance of events, is made the predominant feature. The 
philosophical method proceeds by explaining the connection and 
endeavoring to estimate the relative worth of the phenomena of his- 


6 SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, aND AIDS. 


tory. The genetic method investigates the causal connection of 
phenomena. The standard by which to estimate the relative worth 
or importance of phenomena may be found either immediately in the 
mental state and opinions of the individual student, or in the peculiar 
nature and tendency of the phenomena themselves, or, finally, by 
reference to the joint development in which both the historical object 
and the judging subject, each at its peculiar stage, are involved; 
hence may be distinguished the material, the formal, and the specula- 
tive estimate of systems. A perfect historical exposition depends on 
the union of all the methodical elements uow mentioned. 


The later historians of philosophy in ancient times, as also the earliest modern his- 
torians, contented themselves, for the most part, with the method which consists in merely 
empirical compilation. The critical sifting of materials has been introduced chiefly in 
modern times, by philologists and philosophers. From the first, and before any attempts 
were made at a detailed and general historical delineation, philosophers sought to acquire 
an insight into the causal connection and the value of the different systems, and for the 
earliest philosophies the foundation for such insight was already laid by Plato and Aris- 
totle; but the completion of the work thus begun, the widening and deepening of this 
insight, is a work, to the accomplishment of which every age has sought to furnish its 
contribution and to which each age will always be obliged to contribute, even after the great 
adyances made by modern philosophers, who have sought to make the history of philosophy 
intelligible as a history of development. The subjective estimate of systems, by the 
application of the philosophical (and theological) doctrine of the historian as the norm 
of judgment, has, in modern times, been especially common among the Leibnitzians (Brucker 
and others) and Kantians (Tennemann, notably). The method of formal criticism, which tries 
the special doctrines of a system by its own assumed principle, and this principle itself 
by its capacity of development and application, has been employed by Schleiermacher (par- 
ticularly in his ‘‘Critique of Previous Ethics”) and his successors (especially by Brandis; 
less by Ritter, who is more given to ‘‘ material” criticism). Last of all, the speculative 
method has been adopted by Hegel (in his “ History of Philosophy and Philosophy of His- 
tory”) and by his school. 

To the oft-treated question, whether the history of philosophy is to be understood 
from the stand-point of our own philosophical consciousness, or whether, on the contrary, 
the latter is to be formed, enlarged, and corrected through historical study, the answer is, 
that the case in question, of the relation of the mind to the historical object of its atten- 
tion, is a case of natural action and reaction, and that consequently each form of that 
relation indicated in the question has its natural time and place; the one must follow the 
other, each in its time. The stage of philosophical culture, which the individual, before his 
acquaintance (or at least before his more exact familiarity) with the history of philosophy, 
has already reached, should facilitate his understanding of that history, while it is at the 
same time elevated and refined by his historical studies. On the other hand, the philo- 
sophic consciousness of the student, when perfected by historical and systematic discipline, 
must afterward show itself fruitful in a deeper and truer understanding of history. 


§ 4. The most trustworthy and productive sources for our knowl- 
edge of the history of philosophy are those philosophical works which 


SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. T 


have come down to us in their original form and completeness, and, 
next to these, the fragments of such works which have been pre- 
served under conditions that render it impossible to doubt their genuine- 
ness. In the case of philosophical doctrines which are no longer 
before us in the original language of their authors, those ‘“ reports” 
are to be held most authentic which are based immediately on the 
writings of the philosophers, or in which the oral deliverances of the 
latter are communicated by immediate disciples. If the tendency of 
the author (or so-called “ reporter”), whose statements serve us as 
authorities, is less historical than philosophical, inclining him rather 
to inquire into the truth of the doctrines mentioned by him than 
simply to report them, it is indispensable, as a condition precedent 
to the employment of his statements as historical material, that we 
carefully ascertain the line of thought generally followed by the 
author of whom he treats, and that in its light we test the seuse of 
each of the reporter’s statements. Next to the sources whence the 
“reporter” drew, and the tendency of his work, his own philosophical 
culture and his capacity to appreciate the doctrines he reports, furnish 
the most essential criteria of his credibility. The value of the 
various histories of philosophy as aids to the attainment of a knowl- 
edge and understanding of that history, is measured partly by the de- 
gree of exactness shown by each historian in the communication of the 
original material and his acuteness in their appreciation, and partly by 
the degree of intelligence with which he sifts the essential from the 
non-essential in each philosopher’s teachings, and exhibits the inner 
connection of single systems and the order of development of the 
different philosophical stand-points. 


On the literature of the history of philosophy, compare especially Joh. Jonsius, De Secriptoribus His- 
toriae Philosophicae libri quatuor, Frankf. 1659 ; recogniti atgue ad praesentem actatem usque perducts 
cura, Joh. Chr. Dorn, Jen. 1716. J. Alb. Fabricius, in the Bibl. Graeca, Hamb. 1105 sqq. Joh. Andreas 
Ortloff, Handbuch der Litteratur der Philosophie, 1. Abth.: Die Litteratur der Litterargeschichte und 
Geschichte der Philosophie, Erlangen, 1798. Ersch and Geissler, Bibliographisches Handbuch der 
philosophischen Litteratur der Deutschen von der Mitte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts bis auf die 
neueste Zeit, 3d ed., Leips. 1850. V. Ph. Gumposch, Die philosophische Litteratur der Deutschen von 
1400-1850, Regensburg, 1851, pp. 846-362. Ad. Bichting, Bibliotheca philosophica, oder Verzeichniss 
der von 1857-1867 im deutschen Buchhandel erschienenen philos. Biicher und Zeitschriften, Nordhausen, 
1867. Cf. the copious citations of literature in Buhle’s Geschichte der Philos., and also in F. A. Carus’s 
Ideen zur Gesch. der Philos., Leipsic, 1809, pp. 21-90, in Tennemann’s larger work and in his Manual of 
the History of Philosophy, 5th ed., revised by Amadeus Wendt, Leips., 1829, as also in other works on the 
history of philosophy; see also the bibliographical citations in various monographs relating to literary 
history, such as Ompteda’s on the Literature of International Law, etc., and the comprehensive work of 
Julius Petzholdt, Bibliotheca Bibliographica, Leips. 1866, of which pp. 458-468 are devoted to the history 
of the literature of philosophy. 


The writings of the early Greek philosophers of the pre-Socratic period exist now only 
in fragments. The complete works of Plato are still extant; so also are the most impor 


8 SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. 


tant works of Aristotle, and certain others, which belong to the Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, 
and Neo-Platonic schools. We possess the principal works of most of the philosophers of 
the Christian period in sufficient completeness. 

At the commencement of modern times the disappearance of respect for many species 
of authority, which had previously been accepted, gave special occasion for historical 
inquiry. Lord Bacon, who was unsatisfied by the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics and 
was disposed to favor the pre-Socratic philosophy, speaks of an exposé of the placita 
philosophorum as one of the desiderata of his times. Of the numerous general histories of 
philosophy, the following may here be mentioned :— 

The History of Philosophy, by Thom. Stanley, London, 1655; 2d ed., 1687, 3d ed., 1701; 
translated into Latin by Gottfr. Olearius, Leipsic, 1711; also Venice, 1733. Stanley treats 
only of the history of philosophy before Christ, which is in his view the only philosophy ; 
for philosophy seeks for truth, which Christian theology possesses, so that with the latter 
the former becomes superfluous. Stanley follows in his exposition of Greek philosophy 
pretty closely the historical work of Diogenes Laértius. 

Jac. Thomasii (ob. 1684), Schediasma Historicum, quo varia discutiuntur ad hist. tum 
philos., tum ecclesiasticam pertinentia, Leipsic, 1665; with the title: Origines Hist. Philos. at 
Ecclesiast., ed. by Christian Thomasius, Halle, 1699. Jac. Thomasius first recommended 
disputed questions in the history of philosophy as themes for dissertations. 

J. Dan. Huetii, Demonstratio Evangelica; philosophiae veteris ac novae parallelismus, Am- 
sterdam, 1679. 

Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, 1st ed., Rotterd. 1697. [English transla- 
tion by Birch and Lockman, London, 1734-35, 2d ed., 1736-38.—T7y.] This very compre- 
hensive work deserves to be mentioned here on account of the articles it contains on the 
history of philosophy. Bayle contributed essentially to the awakening of the spirit of 
investigation in this department of study. Yet, as a critic, he deals rather in a philosophical 
criticism of transmitted doctrines from his skeptical stand-point, than in an historical criticism 
of the fidelity of the accounts on which our knowledge of those doctrines is founded. The 
philosophical articles have been published in an abridged German translation by L. H. 
Jakob, 2 vols., Halle, 1797-98. 

The Acta Philosophorum, ed. Christ. Aug. Heumann, Halle, 1715 ff., contain several 
valuable papers of investigation on questions in the history of philosophy. 

Histoire Critique de la Philosophie, par Mr. D. (Deslandes), tom. I—-III., 1st ed., Paris, 
1730-36. Includes also modern philosophy. 

Joh. Jak. Brucker, Kurze Fragen aus der philosophischen Historie, 7 vols., Ulm, 1731-36, 
with additions, ibid. 1737. Historia Critica Philosophiae a mundi incunabulis ad nostram 
usque aetatem deducta, 5 vols., Leips. 1742-44; 2d ed., 1766-67; English abridged transla- 
tion by Wm. Enfield, Lond. 1791. Jnstitutiones hist. philosophicae, usui acad. juventutis ador- 
natae, 1st ed., Leips. 1747. Brucker’s presentation, especially in his chief work, the Historia 
Crit. Philos., is clear and easily followed, though somewhat diffuse, and often interspersed 
with anecdotes, after the manner of Diogenes Laértius, and too rarely portraying the connec- 
tion of ideas. Brucker wrote in the infancy of historical criticism; still he often gives proof 
of a sound and sober insight in his treatment of the historical controversies current in his 
times; least, it is true, in what relates to the earlier periods, far more in his exposition of 
the later. His philosophical judgment is imperfect, from the absence with him of the con. 
ceptions of successive development and relative truth. Truth, he argues, is one, but error 
is manifold, and the majority of systems are erroneous. The history of philosophy shows 
“infinita falsae philosophiae exempla.” Neo-Platonism, for example, Brucker does not 
understand as a certain blending of Hellenism and Orientalism, with a predominance of the 


SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. 9 


form of Hellenism, and still less as a progress from skepticism to mysticism made relatively 
necessary by the nature of things, but as the product of a conspiracy of bad men against 
Christianity—‘‘in id conjuravere pessimi homiines, ut quam veritate vincere non possent reli- 
gionem Christianam, fraude impedirent ;’—and in like manner he sees in Christian Gnosti- 
cism, not a similar blending, with a prevalence of the form of Orientalism, but the result 
of pride and willfulness, ete. Truth is, for him, identical with Protestant orthodoxy, and 
next to that with the Leibnitzian philosophy; according to the measure of its material 
accordance with this norm every doctrine is judged either true or false. 

Agatopisto Cromaziano (Appiano Buonafede), Della Istoria e della Indole di ogni Filosojia, 
Lucca, 1766-81, also Ven. 1782-84, on which is based the work: Della Restauratione di 
ogni Filosofia ne’ Secoli XV., XVI, XVIL, Ven. 1785-89 (translated into German by Carl 
Heydenreich, Leipsic, 1791). 

Dietr. Tiedemann, Geist der speculativen Philosophie, % vols., Marburg, 1791-97. By 
“speculative” Tiedemann means theoretical philosophy. The speculative element in the 
newer sense of this word is unknown to him. His work extends from Thales to Berkeley. 
Tiedemann belongs to the ablest thinkers among the opponents of the Kantian philosophy. 
His stand-point is the stand-point of Leibnitz and Wolff, modified by elements from that of 
Locke. In his interpretation and judgment of the various systems of philosophy, he seeks 
to avoid unfairness and partisanship. But his understanding of them has, occasionally, its 
limits. His principal merit consists in his application of the principle of judging systems 
according to their relative perfection. Tiedemann declares his intention not to make any one 
system the standard by which all others should be judged, since no one is universally 
admitted, but “to consider chiefly, whether a philosopher has said any thing new and has 
displayed acuteness in the support of his assertions, whether his line of thought is marked 
by inner harmony and close connection, and, finally, whether considerable objections have 
been or can be urged in opposition to his assertions.” 

Georg Gustav Fiilleborn, Beitrige zur Geschichte der Philosophie, sections 1-12, Ziilli- 
chau, 1791-99, 

Joh. Gottlieb Buhle, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie und einer kritischen Littera- 
tur derselben, 8 vols., Géttingen, 1796-1804; Geschichte der neueren Philosophie seit der 
Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften, 6 vols., Gottingen, 1800-1805. Buhle 
writes as a disciple of Kant, but with a leaning toward the stand-point of Jacobi. He 
allows his philosophical stand-point rarely to appear. Buhle evinces great reading, and 
has, with critical insight, instituted valuable investigations, especially in the department 
of the history of the literature of philosophy. His “ Gesch. der neueren Philosophie” 
contains many choice extracts from rare works. It forms the sixth part of the encyclo- 
pedical work: “ Gesch. der Kiinste τι. Wiss. seit der Wiederherstellung derselben bis an das 
Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts.” 

Degérando, Histoire Comparée des Systemes de la Philosophie, Tom. I.-III., Paris, 1804; 
2d edit., Tom. I.-IV., Paris, 1822-23. Translated into German by Tennemann, 2 vols., 
Marburg, 1806-1807. 

Friedr. Aug. Carus, Jdeen zur Geschichte der Philosophie, Leipsic, 1809. Fourth part of 
his posthumous works. 

Wilh. Gottlieb Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, 11 vols., Leipsic, 1798-1819. 
The work has never been wholly completed. It was to have filled thirteen volumes. The 
twelfth volume was to have treated of German theoretical philosophy from Leibnitz and 
Chr. Thomasius down to Kant, and the thirteenth of moral philosophy from Descartes 
to Kant. Tennemann’s work is meritorious on account of the extent and independence of 
his study of authorities, and the completeness and clearness of his exposition; but it is 


10 SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. 


marred by not a few misapprehensions, most of which are the result of a one-sided 
method of interpretation from the Kantian stand-point. In his judgments, the measuring- 
rod of the Kantian Critique of the Reason is often applied with too little allowance to the 
earlier systems, although in principle, the idea, already expressed by Kant, of “the 
gradual development of the reason in its striving after science,” is not foreign to him. 

Wilh. Gottlieb Tennemann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie fiir den akademischen 
Unterricht, 1st ed., Leips. 1812; 5th ed., Leips. 1829; the last three editions revised by 
Amadeus Wendt. [English translation (“Manual of the History of Philosophy,” ete.), 
by A. Johnson, Oxford, 1833. The same, revised, enlarged, and corrected by J. R. 
Morell, London, 1852.—T7r.] From this much too brief exposition, it is impossible to 
derive a complete understanding of the different systems; nevertheless it is of value as a 
repertory of notices concerning philosophers and their teachings; especially valuable are 
the perhaps only too numerous literary references, in respect to which Tennemann aimed 
rather at completeness than at judicious selection. 

Jak. Friedr. Fries, Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 vols., Halle, 1837-40. His stand-point, a 
modified Kantianism. 

Friedr. Ast, Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie, Landshut, 1801, 2d ed., 1825. 
He writes from Schelling’s stand-point. 

Thaddi Anselm Rixner, Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie zum Gebrauche seiner 
Vorlesungen, 3 vols., Sulzbach, 1822-23, 2d ed., 1829. Supplementary volume by Victor 
Phil. Gumposch, 1850. The stand-point is that of Schelling. Its numerous citations from 
original sources would render the book an excellent basis for a first study of the history 
of philosophy, if Rixner’s work was not disfigured by great negligence and lack of critical 
skill in the execution of his plan. Gumposch, who brings the national element especially 
into prominence, proceeds far more carefully. 

Ernst Reinhold, Handbuch der allgemeinen Geschichte d-r Philosophie, 2 parts in 3 vols., 
Gotha, 1828-30. Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, Jena, 1836; 2d ed., 1839; 3d ed., 
1849. Geschichte der Philosophie nach den Hauptmomenten ihrer Entwickelung, 5th ed., 3 
vols., Jena, 1858. The presentation is compendious but not sufficiently exact. Reinhold 
thinks and often expresses himself too much in the modern way and too little in the style 
and spirit of the philosophers of whom he treats. 

Heinr. Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, 12 vols., Hamburg, 1829-53; Vols. L-IV., new 
edition, 1836-38. [4 vols. translated. See below, ad $1.—T7r.] The work reaches to 
and excludes Kant; the Uebersicht iiber die Geschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophie seit 
Kant (Brunswick, 1853), supplements and completes it. Ritter adopts substantially the 
stand-point of Schleiermacher. His professed object is, while adhering strictly to facts, 
to present the history of philosophy as “ἃ self-developing whole ;” not, however, viewing 
earlier systems as stepping-stones to any particular modern one, nor judging them from the 
stand-point of any particular system, but rather “from the point of view of the general 
intelligence of the periods to which they belong, respecting the object of the intellectual 
faculties—respecting the right and the wrong in the modes οὔ developing the reason.” 

Under Ritter’s supervision, the following work of Schleiermacher was published, 
after its author’s death: Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1839 (Schleiermacher’s Werke, 
IIL, 4, a). The work is a summary, drawn up by Schleiermacher for his lectures. It 
is not founded in all parts on original historical investigation, but it contains much that 
is very suggestive. 

G. W. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. by Karl Ludw. 
Michelet. 3 vols. (Werke, Vols. XIII-XV.), Berlin, 1833-36; 2d ed., 1840-42. The 
stand-point here is the speculative, characterized above, § 3. Yet Hegel, as matter of fact, 


SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. 11 


has not in detail always maintained the idea of development in its purity, but has some- 
times unhistorically represented the doctrines of philosophers, whom he esteemed, as 
approximating to his own (interpreted, 6. g., many philosophemes of Plato agreeably to his 
own doctrine of immanence), and, ignoring their scientific motives, has misinterpreted those 
of philosophers whom he did not esteem (e.g. Locke); still further, he unjustifiably 
exaggerates in principle the legitimate and fundamental idea of a gradual development, 
observable in the progress of events in general, and particularly in the succession of 
philosophical systems, through the following assumptions :— 

a. That every form of historical reality within its historic limits, and hence, in particu- 
lar, every philosophical system, viewed as a determinate link in the complete evolution of 
philosophy, is to be considered in its place as wholly natural and legitimate; while, never- 
theless, side by side with the historically justified imperfection of individual forms, error 
and perversity, as not relatively legitimate elements, are found, and occasion aberrations in 
point of historic fact from the ideal norms of development (in particular, many temporary 
reactions, and, on the other hand, many false anticipations) ; 

b. That with the Hegelian system the development-process of philosophy has found an 
absolute terminus, beyond which thought has no essential advance to make; 

c. That the nature of things is such that the historical sequence of the various philo- 
sophical stand-points must, without essential variation, accord with the systematic sequence 
of the different categories, whether it be with those of logic alone, as appears from Vorl. 
uber die Gesch. der Philosophie, Vol. I. p. 128, or with those of logic—and the philosophy of 
nature ?—and mental philosophy, as is taught, ἐδῖα, p. 120, and Vol. III. p. 686 ff 

G. Osw. Marbach, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophi2, 1 Abth.: Geschichte der 
griechischen Philosophie, 2 Abth.: Gesch. der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Leipsic, 1838-41. 
Marbach’s stand-point is the Hegelian; but he often makes a somewhat forced application 
of the categories of Hegel’s system to material furnished him chiefly by Tennemann and 
Rixner—though in part drawn from the original sources—and but slightly elaborated by 
himself. The book has remained uncompleted. 

Jul. Braniss, Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant, first vol., Breslau, 1842. The first 
volume, the only one published, is a speculative survey of the history’of philosophy down 
to the Middle Ages. Braniss owes his philosophical stand-point chiefly to Steffens, Schleier- 
macher, and Hegel. 

Christoph. Wilh. Sigwart, Gesch. der Philosophie, 3 vols., Stuttgart, 1854. 

Albert Schwegler, Gesch. der Philos. im Umriss, ein Leitfaden zur Uebersicht, Stuttgart, 
1848, 7th edition, zbid., 1870, Contains a clear presentation of the philosophical stand- 
points, but is seriously imperfect from the omission of the author to describe with sufficient 
minuteness the principal doctrines which belong specially to each system and to the 
subordinate branches of each system, by which means alone a distinct picture can be 
presented. Schwegler’s Compendium has been translated into English, with explanatory, 
critical, and supplementary annotations, by J. H. Stirling, Edinburgh, 1867; 2d ed. 1868. 
{ American translation by J. H. Seelye, N. Y. 1856; 3d ed., 1864.—7'r.] 

Mart. v. Deutinger, Geschichte der Philosophie (1st vol.: Greek Philosophy. 1st div.: 
Till the time of Socrates. 2d diy.: From Socrates till the end of Greek philosophy). 
Regensburg, 1852-53. 

Ludw. Noack, Geschichte der Philosophie in gedrangter Uebersicht, Weimar, 1853. 

Wilh. Bauer, Geschichte der Philosophie fir gebildete Leser, Halle, 1863. 

F. Michelis, Geschichte der Philosophie von Thales bis auf unsere Zeit, Braunsberg, 1865. 

Joh. Ed. Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 vols., Berlin, 1866; 2d 
ed. ibid. 1869-70. 


12 SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. 


F. Schmid (of Schwarzenberg), Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie von Thales vis 
Schopenhauer, vom speculativ-monotheistischen Standpunkte, Erlangen, 1867. 

Conrad Hermann, Gesch. der Philos. in pragmatischer Behandlung, Leipsic, 1867. 

J. H. Scholten, Gesch. der Religion und Philosophie, translated from the Dutch originad 
into French by A. Réville, Paris and Strasbourg, 1861; German translation under the 
above title by Ernst Rud. Redepenning, Elberfeld, 1868. 

E. Dithring, Krit. Gesch. der Philos., Berlin, 1869. 

Victor Cousin, Introduction ἃ U Histoire de la Philosophie and Cours de 0 Histoire de la 
Philosophie Moderne in the Cuvres de V. C., Paris, 1846-48. Fragments Philosophiques, 
Paris, 1840-43. Histoire Générale de la Philosophie depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqwa la 
jin du XVIII. siécle, 5e éd., Paris, 1863. 

J. A. Nourrisson, Tableau des Progrés de la Pensée Humaine depuis Thales jusqwda 
Leibnitz, Paris, 1858; 26 édition, 1860. 

N. J. Laforét, Hist. de la Philosophie; premiere partie: Philos, Ancienne, Brussels and 
Paris, 1867. 

Robert Blakey, History of the Philosophy of Mind, from the earliest period to the present 
time, 4 vols., London, 1848. 

George Henry Lewes, A Biographical History of Philosophy, from its origin in Greece 
down to the present day, London, 1846. The History of Philosophy from Thales to the present 
day, by George Henry Lewes, 3d edition (Vol. I. Ancient Philosophy; Vol. II. Modern 
Philosophy), London, 1866. 

Ed. Zeller, Vortrage und Abhandlungen geschichtlichen Inhalts, Leipsic, 1865, containing : 
1. The development of monotheism among the Greeks; 2. Pythagoras and the legends 
concerning him; 3. A plea for Xanthippe; 4. The Platonic state in its significance for the 
succeeding time; 5. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; 6. Wolff’s banishment from Halle, the 
struggle of pietism with philosophy; 7. Joh. Gottlieb Fichte as a political philosopher ; 
8. Friedr. Schleiermacher; 9. Primitive Christianity; 10. The historical school of Tiibin- 
gen; 11, Ferdinand Christian Baur; 12. Strauss and Rénan. 

Of works on the history of single philosophical disciplines and tendencies (from ancient 
till modern times), the following are specially worthy of mention :— 

Ad. Trendelenburg, Historische Beitrige zur Philosophie, Vol. 1. (History of the Doctrine 
of Categories), Berlin, 1846; Vol. II. (Miscellaneous Essays), ibid. 1855; Vol. IIL. (Mise. 
Essays), ibid. 1867. 

On Religious Philosophy: Karl Friedr. Staudlin, Gesch. und Geist des Skepticismus, 
vorziiglich in Riicksicht auf Moral und Religion, Leipsic, 1794-95; Imman. Berger, Geschichte 
der Religionsphilosophie, Berlin, 1800. 

On the History of Psychology: Friedr. Aug. Carus, Geschichte der Psychologie, Leipsic, 
1808. (Third part of the posthumous works.) The same subject, substantially, is also 
treated of in Albert Stéckl’s Die speculat. Lehre vom Menschen wnd ihre Geschichte, Vol. I. 
(‘‘ Ancient Times”), Wiirzburg, 1858; Vol. II. (“ Patristic Period,” also under the title of 
Geschichte der Philosophie der patristischen Zeit), ibid. 1859; and Geschichte der Philosophie 
des Mittelalters (continuation of the preceding works), Mayence, 1864-65, and in Friedr. 
Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus, Iserlohn, 1866. 

On the History of Ethical and Political Theories: Christoph. Meiners, Geschichte der 
dlteren und neureren Ethik oder Lebensweisheit, Gottingen, 1800-1801. Karl Friedr. Staud- 
lin, Geschichte der Moralphilosophie, Hanover, 1823; and Geschichte der Lehre von der 
Sitilichkeit der Schauspiele, vom Eide, vom Gewissen, etc,, Gott. 1823 ff. Leop. v. Henning, 
Die Principien der Ethik in historischer Entwickelung, Berlin, 1825. Friedr. v. Raumer, Die 
geschichtliche Entwickelung der Begriffe von Staat, Recht und Politik, Leipsic, 1826; 2d ed. 


SOURCES, AUTHORITIES, AND AIDS. 13 


1332; 3d ed. 1861. Joh. Jos. Rossbach, Die Perioden der Rechtsphilosophie, Regensburg, 
1842; Die Grundrichtungen in der Gesch. der Staatswissenschaft, Erlangen, 1842; Gesch. der 
Gesellschaft, Wirzburg, 1868 ff. Heinr. Lintz, Entwurf einer Geschichte der Rechtsphils., 
Dantzic, 1846. Emil Feuerlein, Die philosophische Sittenlehre in ihren geschichtlichen Haupt- 
formen, 2 vols., Tibingen, 1857-59. P. Janet, Histoire de la Philosophie Morale et Politique 
dans 1 Antiquité et les Temps Modernes, Paris, 1858. James Mackintosh, Dissertation on the 
Progress of Ethical Philosophy, London, 1830; new edition, ed. by Will. Whewell, London, 
1863. W. Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, new edition, London, 1862. 
[Robert Blakey, History of Moral Science, second edition, Edinburgh, 1863.—Ed.] Jahnel, 
De Conscientiae Notione, Berlin, 1862. Aug. Neander, Vorlesungen iiber die Gesch. der christ. 
Ethik, ed. by Dr. Erdmann, Berlin, 1864. W. Gass, Die Lehre vom Gewissen, Berlin, 1869. 

On the History of Logic: Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, Vol. I. (Devel- 
opment of Logic in Ancient Times), Leipsic, 1855; Vols. II-IV. (Logic in the Middle 
Ages), ibid. 1861-70. 

On the History of Austhetics: Robert Zimmermann, Geschichte der Aesthetik als philoso- 
phischer Wissenschaft, Vienna, 1858; ef. the historico-critical portions of Vischer’s Aesthetik 
and Lotze’s Gesch. der Aesthetik in Deutschland, Munich, 1868.— [224a" 7H 

More or less copious contributions to the history of philosophical ddctrines may be 
found also in many of the works in which these doctrines are systematically expounded, 
as, for example, in Stahl’s Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht (1st ed., Heidel- 
berg, 1830 ff.), of which the first volume, on the “Genesis of the Current Philosophy of 
Law” (3d ed. 1853), is critico-historical, and relates particularly to the time from 
Kant to Hegel; cf. in like manner Immanuel Herm. Fichte’s System der Ethik, the first or 
critical part of which (Leipsic, 1850) is a history of the philosophical doctrines of right, 
state, and morals in Germany, France, and England from 1750 till about 1850; the first 
volume of K. Hildenbrand’s Geschichte und System der Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie (Leips. 
1860), treats minutely of the history of theories in classical antiquity; much historical 
material is also contained in the works of Warnkoénig, Réder, Réssler, Trendelenburg, and 
others, on the philosophy of law. The works of Julius Schaller (Gesch. der Naturphilosophie 
sett Baco), Rob. y. Mohl (Gesch. u. Lit. der Staatswissenschaften, Erlangen, 1855-58), J. C. 
Bluntschli (Gesch. des allg. Staatsrechts und der Politik seit dem 16 Jahrh. bis zur Gegenwart, 
Munich, 1864, etc.), and some others, relate to modern times. Cf. below, Vol. II. § 1. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF ΑΕΗ 


§ 5. Tus general characteristic of the human mind in ante-Chris- 
tian, and particularly in Hellenic antiquity, may be described as its 
comparatively unreflecting belief in its own harmony and of its one- 
ness with nature. The sense of an opposition, as existing either 
among its own different functions and interests or between the 
mind and nature and as needing reconciliation, is as yet relatively 
undeveloped. The phildsophy of antiquity, like that of every 
period, partakes necessarily, in what concerns its chronological be- 
ginnings and its permanent basis, of the character of the period to 
which it belongs, while at the same time it tends, at least in its 
general and most fundamental direction, upward and beyond the 
level of the period, and so prepares the way for the transition to new 
and higher stages. 


For the solution of the difficult but necessary problem of a general historical and 
philosophical characterization of the great periods in the intellectual life of humanity, the 
Hegelian philosophy has labored most successfully. The conceptions which it employs for 
this end are derived from the nature of intellectual development in general, and they prove 
themselves empirically correct and just when compared with the particular phenomena of 
the different periods. Nevertheless, the opinion is scarcely to be approved, that philosophy 
always expresses itself most purely only in the universal consciousness of the time; the 
truth is, rather, that it rises above the range of the general consciousness through the 
power of independent thought, generating and developing new germs, and anticipating in 
theory the essential character of developments yet to come (thus, 6. g., the Platonic state 
anticipates some of the essential characteristics of the form of the Christian church, and 
the doctrine of natural right, in its development since Grotius, foreshadows the constitu- 
tionalism of the modern state). 


§ 6. Philosophy as science could originate neither among the 
peoples of the North, who were eminent for strength and courage, 
but devoid of culture, nor among the Orientals, who, though suscep- 
tible of the elements of higher culture, were content simply to 
retain them in a spirit of passive resignation,—but only among the 
Hellenes, who harmoniously combined the characteristics of both. 
The Romans, devoted to practical and particularly to political prob- 
lems, scarcely occupied themselves with philosophy except in the 


ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 15 


appropriation of Hellenic ideas, and scarcely attained to any produc- 
tive originality of their own. 


The sacred writings and poetry of the various Orienta: peoples, with their commentaries (Y-King, 
Choa-King; the moral treatises of Confucius and his disciples; the Vedas, the code of Many, the Sakontala of 
the poet Kalidasa, the Puranas or Theogonies, the ancient commentaries;—Zoroaster’s Zendavesta, etc.) are 
the original sources from which our knowledge of their philosophical speculations is derived. Of modern 
works, treating of the religion and philosophy of these peoples, we name the following :— 

Friedr. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, 4 vols., Leipsic and Darmstadt, 1810-12; 
2d ed., 6 vols., 1819 ff. ; Werke, I. 1-4, ibid. 1836 seq. K.J.H. Windischmann, Die Philosophie im Fortgang 
der Weltgeschichte, volume I., sections 1-4 (on the “Foundations of Philosophy in the East”), Bonn, 
1827-34. Stuhr, Die Meligionssysteme der heidnischen. Volker des Orients, Berlin, 1836-88. Ed. 
Roth, Geschichte unserer abenlindischen Philosophie, vol. I., Mannheim, 1846, 2d ed., 1862. (Réth’s 
first volume is devoted to the speculations of the Persians and Egyptians, the second to the oldest Greek 
philosophy. The book, though written in a lively style, is drawn in large measure from inauthentic 
sources, and is not free from arbitrary interpretations and too hazardous comparisons. It contains more 
poetry than historic truth.) Ad. Wuttke, Geschichte des Heidenthums, 2 vols., Breslau, 1852-53. J. C. 
Bluntschli, Adiasiatische Gottes- und Weltideen in ihren Wirkungen auf das Gemeinleben der Men- 
schen, fiinf Vortriége, Nordlingen, 1866. Owing to the stability of Oriental ideas, expositions relating to 
modern times, such as Les Jeligions et les Philosophies dans l Asie centrale, par le comte de Gobineau 
(Paris, 1865), may be profitably consulted by students of their earlier history. Cf. the mythological writings 
of Schwenck and others, and Wolfgang Menzel’s Die vorchristliche Unsterblichkeitslehre (Leipsic, 1870), 
Max Duncker’s Gesch. der Arier (3d ed., 1867), ete.,and numerous articles in the Zeitschrift der deutschen 
morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (ed. by L. Krehl), and in other learned reviews. 

G. Pauthier, Zsquisse d’une Histoire de la Philos. chinoise, Paris, 1844; Les Quatre Livres de Philos. 
Morale et Politique de la Chine, trad. du Chinois, Paris, 1868; L. A. Martin, 7istoire de la Morale, 1.; 
La Morale chez les Chinois, Paris, 1862; J. Π. Plath, Die Religion und der Cultus der alten Chinesen, in 
the Transactions of the Philos.-Philol. Div. of the Bavarian R. Acad. of Sciences, Vol. IX., pt. 8, pp. 731-969, 
Munich, 1863; Confucius und seiner Schiiler Leben und Lehren, Trans, of the Munich Acad. of Sciences, 
XI. 2, Munich, 1867; Τὶ Legge, The Life und Writings of Confucius, with crit. and ereget. notes (in the 
author’s “ Chinese Classics”), London, 1867 [New York, 1870]. 

Colebrooke, Essays on the Vedas; and On the Philosophy of the Hindus, in his Miscellaneous Essays, 
L pp. 9-113, 227-419, London, 1837; partial translation in German by Poley, Leipsic, 1547; new ed. of the 
Essays on the Rel. and Phil. of tre H., London, 1858; A. W. ν. Schlegel, Bhagavad-Gita, i. e, Θεσπέσιον 
μέλος. sive Krishnae et Arjunae colloquium de rebus divinis, Bharatiae episodium. Text, rec.,adn. adj., 
Bonn, 1824; W. v. Humboldt, Veber die wnter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gita bekannte Episode des 
Mahabharata, Berlin, 1826. (Cf. Zegel’s article in the Berlin Jahrviicher, fiir wiss, Kritic, 1827.) Chr. Las- 
sen, Gymnosophista sive Indicae philosophiae documenta, Bonn, 1832; ef. his Ind, Alterthumskunde, 
I.-IV., Leips. 1847-61 ; Othm. Frank, Die Philosophie der ITindu. Vidanta Sara von Sadananda, sanskrit 
und deutsch, Munich, 1835; Theod. Benfey, Jnrdien, in Ersch and Gruber’s Encycl. sect. II., vol. 17, Leips. 
1840; E. Roer, Vedanta-Sara or Essence of the Vedantu, Carcutta, 1845, and Die Lehrspriiche der 
Vaiceshika-Philosophie von Kanada, translated into the German from the Sanscrit, in the Zeitsch» der 
deutschen morgeniindischen Gesellschaft, vol. XXI., 1867, pp. 309-420; Roth, Zur Litteratur und 
@eschichte des Weda, 3 essays, Stuttgart, 1846; Alb. Weber, Indische Literaturgeschichte, Berlin, 1852; 
Indische Skizzen, Berlin, 1857: cf. Indische Studien, ed. by A. Weber, Vol. I. seq., Berlin, 1850 seq.; F. M. 
Miiller, Beitrdge zur Kenntniss der indischen Philosophie, in the 6th and 7th vols. of the Zeitschrift der 
deutschen morgenlind. Gesellschaft, Leipsic, 1852-58; ef. his History of Ancient Indian Literature, 2d 
ed., London, 1860; Max Miller, Chips from a German Workshop, Lond. 1866, N. Y. 1867; I. H. Wilson, 
Essaysand Lectures on the Religions of the indus, collected and edited by R. Rost, Lond. 1861-62. 

Eug. Burnouf, Introduction ἃ Ulfistoire du Bouddhisme indien, Paris, 1844; C. Ἐς Képpen, Die 
Religion des Buddha, 2 vols., Berlin, 1857-59; W. Wassiljew, Der Buddhismus, seine Dogmen, Ges- 
chichte und Litteratur, trans], into German fr. the Russian by Th. Benfey, Leipsic, 1860; Barthélemy St. 
Hilaire, Bouddha et sa Religion, 36 éd., Paris, 1862; Jam. de Alwis, Buddhism, its Origin, History, and 
Doctrines, its Scriptures and their Language, London, 1863; Emil Schlagintweit, Ueber den Gottes- 
begriff der Buddhismus, in the Reports of the Bavar. Acad. of Sciences, 1864, Vol. I. $3-102; R. S. Hardy, 
The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists compared with History and Science, with Introductory 
Notices of the Life and System of Gotama Buddha, London, 1867. 

K. R. Lepsius, Das Todtenduch der Aegypter, Leips. 1842; Die dgypt. Gotteri-reise, Berlin, 1851; M. 
Uhlemann, Thoth oder die Wissenschaft der alten Aegypter, Gottingen, 1855; Aegyptische Alterthums- 
kunde, Leipsic, 1857-58; Chr. K. Josias von Bunsen, Aegyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, Hamburg 


10 ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 


and Gotha, 1845-57. Cf. also, among other works, the article by L. Diestel, which is well adapted as an 
introduction to the study of early Oriental religions: Set-7yphon, Asahel wnd Satan, ein Beitrag zur 
Religionsgeschichte des Orients, in the Zeitschrift fiir historische Theologie, edited by Niedner, 1860, 
pp. 159-217; further, Ollivier Bauregard, Les Divinités Egyptiennes, leur Origine, leur Culte et son 
Expansion dans le Monde, Puris, 1866. 

J. G. Rhode, Die heilige Sage oder das gesammte Religionssystem der alten Baktrer, Meder und 
Perser oder d2s Zendvolks, Frankf. on the M. 1820; Martin Haug, Die fiinf Gathi’s oder Sammlungen 
von Liedern und Spriichen Zarathustra’ 8, seiner jiinger und Nachfolger, Leips. 1858 and 1860 (in the 
Transactions of the German Oriental Society); Zssay on Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of 
the Parsees, Bombay, 1862. 

On the religious conceptions of the Jews, compare, among others, G, IT. Ewald, in his Gesch. des Volkes 
Israil bis auf Christus, L. Herzfeld in his Gesch, des Volkes Jisraél von der Vollendung des zweiten 
Tempels bis zur Einsetzung des Makkabders Schimon, and Georg Weber in Das Volk Israel in der 
alttestamentlichen Zeit, Leipsic, 1867 (the first volume of the work by Weber and Holtzman, entitled: 
Gesch, Ges Volkes Israel und der Entstehung des Christenthums, 2 vols., Leips. 1867). Alexander Kohut 
(among recent writers) treats specially of Jewish angelology and demonology in their dependence on Par- 
seeism, in the Abhandl. fiir Kunde des Morgenlandes, ed. by Herm. Brockhaus; his work also published 
separately, Leipsic, 1866. 


The so-called philosophy of the Orientals lacks in the tendency to strict demonstration, 
and hence in scientific character. Whatever philosophical elements are discoverable 
among them are so blended with religious notions, that a separate exposition is scarcely 
possible. Besides, even after the meritorious investigations of modern times, our knowl- 
edge of Oriental thought remains far too incomplete and uncertain for a connected and 
authentic presentation. We omit, therefore, here the special consideration of the various 
theorems of Oriental philosophy, and confine ourselves to the following general state- 
ments. 

The doctrine of Confucius (551-479 Β. 6.), as also that of his followers (Meng-tsen, 
born 371 8. c., and others), is mainly a practical philosophy of utilitarian tendency. 
Its theoretical speculations (which are based on the generalized conception of the an- 
tithesis of male and female, heaven and earth, etc.) are not scientifically wrought out. 
The rich but immoderate fancy of the Hindus generated, on the basis of a pantheistic 
conception of the world, a multiplicity of divinities, without investing them with har- 
monious form and individual character. Their oldest gods—of whom the Vedas treat— 
group themselves about three supreme divinities of nature, Indra, Varuni, and Agni. 
Later (perhaps about 1300 B. 6.) supreme veneration was paid to the three divine beings, 
which constituted the Hindu Trimurti, viz.: to Brahma, as the original source of the 
world (which is a reflected picture in the mind of Brahma, produced by the deceiving 
Maja), to Vischnu, as preserver and governor, and to Siva, as destroyer and producer. 
The oldest body of Brahman doctrine is the Mimansa, which includes a theoretical part, 
the Brahmamimansa or Vedanta, and a practical part, the Karmamimansa. To the (uni- 
versalistic) Mimansa (‘‘ Investigation”) Kapila opposed the Sankhya (‘‘Consideration,” 
“ Critique "—an individualistic doctrine, which denied the world-soul and taught the 
existence of individual souls only). We find already in the Sankhya a theory of the kinds 
and the objects of knowledge. To the authors of the Niava-doctrine, which subsequently 
arose, the Syllogism was known. The age of these doctrines is uncertain. Jn opposition 
to the religion of Brahma arose (not far from 550 B. c.) Buddhism, which was an attempt 
at a moral reformation, hostile to castes, but the source of a new hierarchy. Its followers 
were required to make it their supreme aim to rise above the checkered world of changing 
appearance, with its pain and vain pleasure. But this ead was to be reached, not so much 
through positive moral and intellectual discipline, as through another process, termed 
“ entrance into Nirvana,” whereby the soul was saved from the torments of transmigra- 
tion and the individual was brought into unconscious unity with the All, The Persian reli- 


ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 17 


gion, founded or reformed by Zarathustra (Zoroaster), was opposed to the old Hindu religion, 
whose gods it regarded as evil demons. Over against the kingdom of light or of good was 
placed, in dualistic opposition, the kingdom of darkness or evil; after a long contest the 
former was to triumph. The Egyptians are credited with the doctrines of the judgment 
of departed souls and of their transmigration, which doctrines Herodotus (11. 53, 81, 123) 
supposes to have passed from them to the Orphists and the Pythagoreans. Their 
mythology seems scarcely to have exercised any influence on the Grecian thinkers. Some- 
what more considerable may have been the influence on the Greeks of the early astronomi- 
cal observations of the Egyptians, and perhaps also of their geological observations and 
speculations. Certain geometrical propositions seem rather to have been merely discovered 
empirically by the Egyptians in the measurement of their fields, than to have been 
scientifically demonstrated by them; the discovery of the proofs and the creation of a 
system of geometry was the work of the Greeks. The Jewish monotheism, which scarcely 
exercised an (indirect ?) influence on Anaxagoras, became later an important factor in the 
evolution of Greek philosophy (7. 6. from the time of Neo-Pythagoreanism and in part even 
earlier), when Jews, through the reception of elements of Greek culture, had acquired 
a disposition for scientific thought. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ΘΈΤΟ. 


§ 7. Tue sources of our knowledge of the philosophy of the 
Greeks are contained partly in the philosophical works and frag- 
ments which have come down from them to us, and partly in reports 
and occasional allusions. Modern historians have advanced grad- 
ually in the employment of this material from the method of mere 
compilation to a more exact historical criticism and a purer and 
more profound philosophical comprehension. 


The earlier philosophemes are never mentioned by Plato and Aristotle in the form of 
mere repetition with historic intent, but always as incidental to the end of ascertaining 
philosophical truth. Plato sketches, with historical fidelity in the essential outlines, 
though with a poetic freedom of execution, vivid pictures of the various philosophies, 
which had preceded his own, as also of the persons who had been their representatives. 
Aristotle proceeds rather with realistic exactness both in outline and in details, and only 
departs occasionally from complete historic rigor in his reduction of earlier points of view 
to the fundamental conceptions of his own system. The increasing restriction of later 
classical authors to simple narrative is not calculated in general to impart to their state- 
ments the advantage of greater fidelity, since they are generally lacking either in accurate 
knowledge of the proper authorities, or in full capacity for the clear comprehension of 
earlier philosophical opinions. 

Plato characterizes in various dialogues the doctrines of Heraclitus and Parmenides, 
of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Pythagoreans, of Protagoras, Gorgias, and other 
Sophists, and especially those of Socrates and of individual disciples of Socrates. Next to 
him, Xenophon (especially in the Memorabilia) is the most important authority for Socrates 
and his teaching. Aristotle, in all his writings, makes it his principle to consider, first 
of all, in the discussion of any problem, what results obtained by his predecessors are 
tenable, and presents, in particular, in the introduction to his “first philosophy ” (Meta- 
physics), a critical review of the principles of all earlier philosophers from Thales to Plato 
(Met. I. ec. 3-10). In many places, also, Aristotle gives information concerning Plato's 
“‘unwritten doctrines,” as delivered in the oral lectures of the latter. A number of minor 
works, in which Aristotle (according to Diog. L., V. 25) had treated of the doctrines of 
various previous philosophers (περὶ τῶν Πυθαγορείων, περὶ τῆς ᾿Αρχύτου φιλοσοφίας, περὶ τῆς 
Σπευσίππου καὶ Ξενοκράτους, ete.) are lost; we find, however, in the Commentators many 
statements drawn from them. The like is true of the works of Theophrastus on earlier 
philosophers (περὶ τῶν ᾿Αναξαγόρου͵ περὶ τῶν ᾿Αναξιμένους͵ περὶ τῶν ᾿Αρχελάου, Histories of 
Arithmetic, of Geometry, of Astronomy, περὶ τῆς Δημοκρίτου ἀστρολογίας, τῶν Διογένους 
συναγωγῆ, περὶ ᾿Εμπεδοκλέους, Μεγαρικός, etc., and his comprehensive work, φυσικαὶ δόξαι, of 
which fragments are extant; an abridgment of this work appears to have been used by 
later writers as a principal source of information, see Diog. L., V. 42 seq.; cf. Usener, 


GREEK PHILOSOPHY—-SOURCES, 19 


Analecta Theophrastea, Leips. 1858). Of Platonists, Speusippus (περὶ φιλοσόφων, ἸΠλάτωνος 
ἐγκώμιον), Xenocrates (περὶ τῶν Παρμενίδου and Ilvdaydgeca), and Heraclides of Pontus 
(περὶ τῶν Πυϑαγορείων, πρὸς τὰ Ζήνωνος, Ἡρακλείτου ἐξηγήσεις, πρὸς τὸν Δημόκριτον ἐξηγήσεις), 
and, later, notably Clitomachus (about 140 B. C., περὶ τῶν αἱρέσεων), and of Aristotelians, 
besides Theophrastus and Eudemus (γεωμετρικαὶ ἱστορίαι, ἀριϑμητικὴ ἱστορία, περὶ τῶν ἀστρο- 
λογουμένων ἱστορία), Aristoxenus (ἱστορικὰ ὑπομνήματα, περὶ Πυϑαγόρου καὶ τῶν γνωρίμων 
αὐτοῦ, Πλάτωνος βιος), Diceearch (βίος “Ἑλλάδος, also περὶ βίων), Phanias of Lesbos (περὶ 
τῶν Σωκρατικῶν and πρὸς τοὺς σοφιστάς), Clearchus, Strato, Duris of Samos, the pupil of 
Theophrastus (about 270 B. c.), and others either treated originally of earlier philosophers, 
or wrote works of more general content, or works pertaining to the history of special 
sciences, which contained material for the history of philosophy. Also Epicurus (περὶ 
αἱρέσεων) and his disciples, Hermarchus, Metrodorus, and Colotes (in polemical works), and 
Idomeneus (περὶ τῶν Σωκρατικῶν), and the Stoics Cleanthes (On Heraclitus), Sphaerus (On 
Heraclitus, On Socrates, and On the Eretrian Philosophers), Chrysippus (On the Harly 
Physiologists), Panaetius (On the Philosophical Schools or Sects, περὶ τῶν αἱρέσεων), and 
others wrote of philosophical doctrines and works. Of all these works, which served as 
authorities for later writers, we possess none. 

The Alexandrians followed in their works the narratives of the authors above named. 
Ptolemy Philadelphus (reg. 285-247 3b. 6.) founded the Alexandrian Library (for which 
preparations had already been begun under his father by Demetrius Phalereus, who came 
to Alexandria about 296 B. c., and) in which the writings of the philosophers were brought 
together, though not a few spurious works were included among them. Callimachus of 
Cyrene (about 294-224 B. c.), while superintendent of this library (in which office he suc- 
ceeded Zenodotus the Ephesian, who lived about 324-246 B. c.), drew up “tables” of cele- 
brated authors and their works (πίνακες τῶν ἐν πάσῃ παιδείᾳ διαλαμψάντων καὶ ὧν συνέγραψαν. 
Eratosthenes (276-194 B. 6.), who received from Ptolemy EKuergetes (reg. 247-222) the con- 
trol of the Alexandrian Library, wrote concerning the various philosophical schools (περὶ τῶν 
κατὰ φιλοσοφίαν αἱρέσεων), on which, as it seems, Apollodorus founded his (metrical) chron- 
icle (composed in the second half of the second century B. c.), from which, again, Diogenes 
Laértius and others drew a large part of their chronological data. Aristophanes of Byzan- 
tium (born about 264, died about 187 B. c., pupil of Zenodotus and Callimachus, successor, 
as librarian, of Apollonius, the successor of Eratosthenes, and teacher of Aristarchus, 
who lived about 212-140 B. c.) arranged most of the Platonic Dialogues in Trilogies, 
placing the others after them as separate works (a part of his supplement to the πίνακες 
of Callimachus; see Nauck’s Sammlung der Fragmente des Aristophanes von Byzanz). Be- 
sides Eratosthenes, the following persons wrote either expressly or incidentally of the 
lives and succession of the philosophers and of their works and doctrines: Neanthes of 
Cyzicus (about 240 B. c., resided at the court of King Attalus I. in Pergamus, and wrote 
μουσικά and περὶ ἐνδόξων ἀνδρῶν), Antigonus Carystius (about 225, βίοι, ete.), Hermippus 
(of Smyrna? about 200 8. c.), the Callimachean (and Peripatetic), who, like Aristophanes 
of Byzantium in other departments, furnished in his biographico-literary opuscules, which 
were only too abundant in fables (regi τῶν; σοφῶν, περὶ μάγων, περὶ Πυϑαγόρονυ, περὶ 
"Αριστοτέλους,͵ περὶ Θεοφράστου, βίοι), a supplement to the πίνακες of Callimachus (from which 
Favorinus and, indirectly, Diogenes Laértius drew largely), Sotion the Peripatetic (about 
190 8. σ., περὲ διαδοχῶν τῶν φιλοσόφων), Satyrus (about 180 B. c., βίου, Apollodorus of Athens 
(about 144 B. c., a pupil of Diogenes the Stoic, and author of the mythological βιβλιοθήκη 
and of the before-mentioned yoowxd, and perhaps also of the work περὶ τῶν φιλοσόφων 
αἱρέσεων), and Alexander Polyhistor (in the time of Sulla, διαδοχαί τῶν φιλοσόφων). From 
the διαδοχαί of Sotion and the βίοι of Satyrus, Heraclides Lembus (about 150 B. c.), the 


20 GREEK PHILOSOPHY—SOURCES. 


son of Serapion, compiled extracts, which are often mentioned by Diogenes Laértius (who 
distinguishes—V. 93, 94—fourteen persons named Heraclides). Antisthenes of Rhodus 
(about 150 B.c.), the historian, and contemporary of Polybius, was probably the author of 
the φιλοσόφων διαδοχαὶ, to which Diogenes Laértius often alludes. Demetrius the Magne- 
sian, a teacher of Cicero, wrote a critical work on Homonymous Authors (περὶ ὁμωνύμων 
ποιητῶν καὶ συγγραφέων), from which Diogenes Laértius, perhaps through Diocles, drew 
many of his statements (cf. Scheurleer, De Demetrio Magnete, diss. tmaug., Leyden, 
1858). Didymus Chalcenterus (in the second half of the first century B. 6.) also 
labored in the field of the history of philosophy, as a compiler of sentences. Sosicrates 
wrote διαδοχαί, which Diogenes Laértius often mentions. Diocles Magnes, a friend of 
Epicureanism and opponent of Sotion, the partisan of the philosophy of Sextius, in the 
time of Augustus and Tiberius, was the author of works entitled βίοι φιλοσόφων and 
ἐπιδρομὴ φιλοσόφων, from which Diog. Laértius, at least in his account of the Stoics, and 
most likely also in that of the Epicureans, drew very largely. (According to Nietzsche, 
Diogenes derived most of his data from Diocles Magnes and Favorinus.) 

Of the works of the ancients which have come down to us, those specially important 
for the history of philosophy are the works of Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, the 
historian and Platonic philosopher, Galenus, the physician (born 131, died after 200 a. D.), 
Sextus the Skeptic (flourished about 200 A. D., a physician of the empirical school, aud 
hence usually named Sextus Empiricus), the historical work (founded largely on the ἀπο- 
μνημονεύματα and παντοδαπὴ ἱστορία of Favorinus) by Diogenes of Laérta (in Cilicia, about 
220 a. p.), and the writings of numerous Neo-Platonists (but Porphyry’s φιλόσοφος ἱστορία 
is no longer extant) and commentators of Aristotle; of similar importance are the works 
of certain of the Church Fathers, especially those of Justin Martyr (Apolog. and Dialog. 
cum Tryphone), Clemens of Alexandria (Hxhortation to the Hellenes, Paedagogus, Stromata), 
Origen (Contra Celsum, etc.), and Eusebius (Praeparatio Evangelica), and in part those of 
Tertullian, Lactantius, and Augustine. Many materials for the history of philosophy 
are found in Gellius (about 150 A. D., in his Noctes Atticae), Athenaeus (about 200, 
Deipnosophistae), Flavius Philostratus (about 200), Eunapius of Sardis (about 400) 
Johannes Stobaeus (about 500), Photius (about 880, Lexicon and Bibliotheca), and 
Suidas (about 1000, Lexicon); the work regi τῶν ἐν παιδείᾳ διαλαμψάντων σοφῶν, ascribed 
to Hesychius of Miletus, appears to be a compilation from Diogenes Laértius and Suidas, 
dating from the 15th century (see Lehrs, in the hein. Mus. XVII., 1862, pp. 453-457). 
Cicero gives evidence in his writings of a tolerably extensive and exact acquaintance with 
the philosophical schools of his time, but his knowledge of Greek speculation was insufti- 
cient. A higher value belongs to most of the historical statements of the commentators 
of Aristotle, since these were founded on original works of the philosophers, which were 
then extant, or on various reports by Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other authors, which 
have not come down to us. 

Ciceronis Historia Philosophiae Antiquae ex Omnibus Iilius Scriptis collegit Fr. Gedike, 
Berlin. 1782, 1801, 1814. 

The works of Plutarch entitled regi τῶν πρώτων φιλοσοφησάντων καὶ τῶν ἀπ’ αὐτῶν, περὶ 
Κυρηναίων, ἐκλογὴ φιλοσόφων, and στρωματεῖς ἱστορικοί are not preserved. Plutarch’s 
‘“‘Moralia” contain valuable contributions to the history of philosophy, especially in what 
relates to the Stoic and Epicurean doctrines. The work entitled Plut. de Physicis Philo- 
sophorum Decretis Libri Quinque (ed. Dan. Beck, Leipsic, 1787, and contained also in Wyt- 
tenbach’s and Diibner’s editions of the ‘ Moralia”’) is spurious. 

Claud. Galeni Liber περὶ φιλοσόφου ἱστορίας (in the complete ed. of the Works of Galen, 
ed. Kiihn, vol. XIX.) The work is spurious. Leaving out the commencement, it agrees 





GREEK PHILOSOPHY—SOURCES. oF 


almost throughout with the Pseudo-Plutarchic work above-mentioned, of which it is a recen- 
sion somewhat abridged. In the genuine writings of Galen, however, there is found, in 
addition to their medical contents, much that concerns the history of philosophy. 

Sexti Empirici Opera, Pyrrhoniarum Institutionwm Libri Tres (πυῤῥώνειοι ὑποτυπώσεις͵ 
Skeptical Sketches); Contra Mathematicos sive Disciplin. Professores Libri sex, Contra Philoso- 
phos libri quingue; the two also together under the title: Adversus Math. Libri XI. 
(Against the representatives of the positive sciences and against philosophical dogmatists.) 
Ed. Jo. Alb. Fabricius, Leipsic, 1718; reprinted did. 1842. Hx. rec. Imm. Bekker, Berlin, 
1842. 

Flavii Philostrati Vitae Sophistarum. Ed. Car. Lud. Kayser, Heidelberg, 1838. Opera 
ed. Kayser, Ziirich, 1844-46 ; zbid. 1853; ed. Ant. Westermann, Paris, 1849. 

Athenaei Deipnosophistae. Ed. Aug. Meineke, Leipsic, 1858-59. 

Diogenis Laértii de Vitis, Dogmatibus et Apophthegmatibus Clarorum Philosophorum libri 
decem (περὶ βίων͵ δογμάτων καὶ ἀποφϑεγμάτων τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων βιβλία δέκα). 
Hd. Hiibner, 2 vols., Leips. 1828-31; Commentaries on the same, vols. I. and IL, Leips. 
1830-33, containing the notes of Is. Casaubonus, Aeg. Menagius and others. The com- 
mentary of Menagius on Diogenes Laértius appeared first in 1652. Diog. L. De Vitis, etc., 
e% Italicis codicibus nunc primum excussis recensuit C. Gabr. Cobet. Accedunt Olympiodori, 
Ammonit, Jamblichi, Porphyrit et aliorum Vitae Platonis, Aristotelis, Pythagorae, Plotini et 
Isidori, Ant. Westermanno, et Marini vita Procli, J. Ε΄. Botssonnadio edentibus. Graece et 
Latine cum indicibus, Paris, 1850. Cf. Frdr. Bahnsch, De Diog. L. Fontibus, (diss.-inaug. 
Regimontanensis,) Gumbinnen, 1868; Frdr. Nietzsche, De Laértii Diogenis Fontibus, in 
the Rhein. Museum, new series, XXIII. 1868, and XXIV. 1869. Diogenes Laértius dedi- 
cated his work, according to III. 47, to a female admirer of Plato. His general attitude 
is that of an Eclectic, while in the different parts of his work he is influenced by 
the character of the sources from which he draws. Diogenes brings the history 
of Platonism down to Clitomachus, that of Aristotelianism to Lyco, that of Stoicism, 
in our text, to Chrysippus, though originally (as shown by Valentine Rose in the 
Hermes, vol. J., Berlin, 1866, p. 370 ff.) it was continued to Cornutus; he names the 
principal Epicureans down to Zeno of Sidon, Demetrius Laco, Diogenes Tarsensis, and 
Orion; only the history of Skepticism is brought down by him to his own time, 7. e., till 
near 220 A. D. 

Clementis Alexandrini Opera. Hd. Reinhold. Klotz, Leipsic, 1830-34. Origenis φιλοσο- 
φούμενα, in Jac. Gronovii Thesawr. Antiquitatum Graecarum, tom. X., Leyden, 1701, pp. 
257-292. Compendium Historiae Philosophicae Antiquae sive Philosophumena, quae sub 
Origenis nomine circumferuntur, ed. Jo. Christoph. Wolf, Hamb. 1706, 2d ed., ἐδίά. 1716; 
also in the complete editions of Origen. Qpcyévove φιλοσοφούμενα ἢ κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων 
ἔλεγχος, Origenis Philosophwmena, sive Omnium Haeresium Refutatio, e codice Parisino nunc 
primum ed. Emman. Miller, Oxford, 1851. S Hippolyti Refutationis Omnium Haeresium 
Librorum Decem quae supersunt, ed. L. Duncker et F. ἃ. Schneidewin, opus Schneidewino 
defuncto absolit L. Duncker, Gott. 1859, ed. Patricius Cruice, Paris, 1860. Of this work, 
the first book, which seems to be founded in large measure on the abridgment made in the 
Alexandrian period, of the περὶ φυσικῶν of Theophrastus, is identical with the φιλοσο- 
govueva, which is all of the work that was known until recently. Books IV.—X., with 
the exception of the beginning of Book IV., were found in a cloister on Mount Athos 
in 1842. That Origen was not the author of the work is certain; that it was written by 
the Church Father, Hippolytus, who lived about 220 a. D., and was a pupil of Irenzeus, is 
extremely probable. 

Eusebii Praeparatio Evangelica, ed. Viger, Paris, 1628; ed. Heinichen, Leips. 1842-43. 


22 GREEK PHILOSOPHY——SOURCES. 


Kusebius draws very largely from Pseudo-Plutarch. de Placitis Philosophorum, or more 
likely from a fuller edition of that work. 

Eunapii Sardiani Vitae Philosophorum et Sophistarum. Ed. J. F. Boissonade, Amst. 
1822; Paris, 1849. 

Jo. Stobaei Florilegium, ed. Thom. Gaisford, Oxford, 1822; Leipsic, 1823-23; ed. Aug. 
Meinecke, Leipsic, 1855-57. Helogae Physicae et Ethicae, ed. Arnold Herm. Lud. Heeren, 
Gott., 1792-1801; ed. Thom. Gaisford, Oxford, 1850; ed. Aug. Meineke, vol. I., Leips. 1860, 
Vol. IL, ἐδ. 1864. The Hclogae agree with Pseudo-Plutarch, De Placitis Philos., and Pseudo- 
Galen in those parts which relate to the same topics, but they contain, in passages, fuller 
extracts from the common source from which each of these writers drew. Many of the 
statements of the Bishop Theodoret, who died in 457, were drawn from this compilation. 

Hesychii Milesti Opuscula, ed. Jo. Conr. Orelli, Leipsic, 1820. 

Simplicii Comm. ad Arist. Physicas Auscultationes. Ed, Asulanus, Venice, 1526. 

Michael Hissman, in the Magazin fiir die Philosophie und thre Geschichte, 6 vols. Gott. 
and Lemgo, 1778-83, brought together a number of essays taken from the <Annals of 
various academies, many of which relate to ancient philosophy. Among these, attention 
may be directed to the articles on T’hales and Anaximander by the Abbé de Canaye, on Py- 
thagoras by De la Nauze and by Fréret, on Hmpedocles by Bonamy, on Anaxagoras by Abbé 
le Batteux and by Heinius, on Socrates by Abbé Fraguier, on Aristippus by Le Batteux, on 
Plato by Abbé Garnier, on Callisthenes by Sevin, on Huhemerus by Sevin, Fourmont, and 
Foucher, on Panaetius and on Athenodorus by Sevin, on Musonius and on Seatius by De 
Burigny, on Peregrinus the Cynic by Capperonier, and on Proclus by De Burigny. 

Christoph. Meiners, Historia Doctrinae de Vero Deo, Lemgo, 1780. Geschichte des 
Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenchaften in Griechenland und kom, Lemgo, 
1781-82.  Grundriss der Gesch. der Weltweisheit, Lemgo, 1786; 2d ed. 1789. 

Ὁ. Tiedemann, Griechenlands erste Philosophen oder Leben und Systeme des Orpheus, Phere- 
cydes, Thales, und Pythagoras, Leipsic, 1781. 

Fr. Vict. Leberecht Plessing, Histor. wnd philos. Untersuchungen ἰδοῦ die Denkart, 
Theologie und Philosophie der dltesten Volker, vorziiglich der Griechen, bis auf Aristot. Zeit, 
Elbing, 1785; Mnemonium oder Versuche zur Enthiillung der Geheimnisse des Alterthums, 
Leipsic, 1787; Versuche zur Aufklirung der Philosophie des diltesten Alterthums, Leipsic, 
1788. 

Wilh. Traug. Krug, Geschichte der Philosophie alter Zeit, vornehmlich unter Griechen und 
Romern, Leipsic, 1815; 2d ed., 1827. 

Zeller writes of what has been done in the department of the history of ancient philoso- 
phy since Buhle and Tennemann, in the Jahrbiicher der Gegenwart, July, 1843. 

Historia philosophiae Graeco-Romanae ex fontium locis contexta. Locos collegerunt, dis- 
posuerunt, notis auxerunt H. Ritter, L. Preller. Hdidit L. Preller, Hamburg, 1838. dit. 
11 recogn. et auxit L. Preller, Gotha, 1856. Hd. 111. Gotha, 1864. Hd. JV., 1869. (A val- 
uable compilation.) 

Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, ed. F. W. Mullach, Paris, 1860-67. 

Christian Aug. Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte der Griechisch-Rémischen Philosophie 
(Part I.: Pre-Socratic Philosophy; Part II., 1st Div.: Socrates, the Imperfect Disciples of 
Socrates and Plato; Part IL, 2d Div.: Aristotle; Part ITI., lst Div.: Review of the Aris- 
totelian System and Exposition of the Doctrines of his Immediate Successors, as transition 
to the third period of the development of Greek Philosophy), Berlin, 1835, 44, ’53, ’57, '60. 
Geschichte der Entwickelungen der griechischen Philosophie und ihrer Nachwirkungen im 
romischen Reiche, first half (till Aristotle), Berlin, 1862, second half (from the Stoics and 
Epicureans to the Neo-Platonists, constituting, with the “ Ausfiihrungen,” which appeared 





GREEK PHILOSOPHY—SOURCES. 23 


in 1866, the 2d division of the 3d part of the ‘“‘ Handbuch’) tb. 1864. An extremely care- 
ful, comprehensive, and learned investigation. The “ Geschichte der Entwickelungen” is a 
shorter and compendious treatment of the subject. 

Aug. Bernh. Krische, Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der alten Philosophie. 1st Vol.: Dis 
theologischen Lehren der griechischen Denker, eine Priifung der Darstellung Cicero's, Gottingen, 
1840. 

Ed. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, eine Untersuchung tiber Character, Garg und 
Hauptmomente threr Entwickelung (Part I.: General Introduction, Pre-Socratic Philosophy. 
Part II.: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Part III.: Post-Aristotelian Philosophy), Tibingen, 
1844, 46, 52. Second revised edition, with the title, Die Philosophie der Griechen in threr 
gesch. Entwickelung dargestelit. Part I., Titb. 1856. Part II. (Socrates and the Socratic 
Schools, Plato and the Old Academy), Τρ. 1856. Part II. 2d Div. (Aristotle and the Karly 
Peripatetics), Tib. 1862. Part III. 1st Div. (Post-Aristotelian philosophy), Ist half, Leips. 
1865; 2d half, with a Register, 2b. 1869. Third Edition, Part 1., ib. 1869. [‘Socrates 
and the Socratic Schools” (London, 1868) and “The Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics” 
(Lond. 1869), are translations by Dr. Oswald Reichel from this work of Zeller—T77r.] This 
work gives evidence of the most admirable combination of philosophical profoundness 
and critical sagacity in the author. The philosophical stand-point of the author is a Hege- 
lianism modified by empirical and critical elements. 

Karl Prantl, Uebersicht der griechisch-rémischen Philosophie, Stuttgart, 1854; new 
edition, 1863. 

A. Schwegler, Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, ed. by ©. Késtlin, Tiibingen, 1859; 
second enlarged edition, 7b. 1870 (1869). 

Ludwig Striimpell, Die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, zur Uebersicht, Repetition 
und Orientirung bei eigenen Studien entworfen (1st Div.: The Theoret. Philos. of the 
Greeks; 2d Div.: Their Practical Philosophy), Leipsic, 1854-61. The stand-point is 
Herbartian. 

N. J. Schwarz, Manuel de Histoire de la Philosophie Ancienne, Liége, 1842; 2. éd. 
Liége, 1846. Ch. Renonvier, Manuel de Philosophie Ancienne, Paris, 1845. Charles 
Lévéque, Etudes de Philosophie Grecque et Latine, Paris, 1864. L. Lenoel, Les Philoso- 
phes de V Antiqguité, Paris, 1865. M. Morel, Hist. de la Sagesse et du Goat chez ks Grecs, 
Paris, 1865. 

Franco Fiorentino, Saggio Storico sulla Filosofia Greca, Florence, 1865. 

W. A. Butler, Lectwres on the History of Anctent Philosophy, edited by W. H. Thompson, 
2 vols., Cambridge, 1856; London, 1866. Lectures on Greek Philosophy, and other Philo- 
sophical Remains of James Frederick Ferrier, ed. by Al. Grant and EK. L. Lushington, 2 
vols., Edinb. and London, 1866. [Ritter’s //istory of Ancient Philosophy, translated from 
the first volumes of Ritter’s general history, mentioned above, § 4, by Alex. J. W. Morri- 
son, 4 vols., Oxford, 1838-46. Walter Anderson, The Philosophy of Ancient Greece investi- 
gated in its Origin and Progress, Edinb. 1791.—T.] 

Of ancient physical theories, Th. Henri Martin treats in La Foudre, lElectricité, et le 
Magnétisme chez les Anciens, Paris, 1866. Cf. also Charles Thurot, Recherches Historiques 
sur le Principe d’ Archimede (Extrait de la Revue Archéologique), Paris, 1869. 

On Greek and Roman theories of law and of the state, cf—beside the work of K. 
Hildenbrand, cited above, p. 13—A. Veder, Historia Philosophiae Juris apud Veteres, Leyden, 
1832; Herm. Henkel, Lineamenta Artis Graecorum FPoliticue, Ber]. 1847; Studien zu einer 
Geschichte der griechischen Lehre vom Staat, in the Philologus, Vol. IX., 1854, p. 402 seq.; Zur 
Geschichte der griech. Staatswiss. (G. Pr.) Salzwedel, 1863 and 1866, Stendal, 1867 and 1869. 
M. Voigt, Die Lehre vom Jus Naturale, Aequum et Bonum und Jus Gentiwm der Romer, 


94 THE EARLY POETS AND SAGES. 


Leips. 1856. (On Greek theories, pp. 81-176.) Cf. also the extensive work of Ihering: 
Geist des rémischen Rechts auf den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwickelung, Leips. 1852 seq. 

Of the relation of Hellenic Ethics to Christianity, Neander treats in his Wiss. Abhand- 
lungen, ed. by J. Jacobi, Berlin, 1851; cf. his above-cited ‘‘Vorlesungen tiber die Gesch. der 
christlichen Ethik.” W. Wehreupfennig (Progr. des Joachimsthal’schen Gymnasiums, Berlin, 
1856) writes of the diversity of ethical principles among the Hellenes and its causes. Ad 
Garnier, De la Morale dans U Antiquité, Paris, 1865. 

On ancient Aisthetics, see Eduard Miller, Gesch. der Theorte der Kunst bei den Alten, 
Breslau, 1834-37. Of. Zimmermann’s Gesch. der Aesthetik and A. Kuhn, Die Idee des 
Schénen in ihrer Entwickelung bei den Alten bis in unsere Tage, 2d edit., Berlin, 1865. 

On the doctrine of Unity, see Wegener, De Uno sive Unitate apud Graecorwm Philosophos., 
Realschul-Progr., Potsdam, 1863. 

On ancient views of the Immortality of the Soul, see Karl Arnold, Gymn.-Progr., 
Straubing, 1864. 

Of the Philosophy of Language among the ancients, treat Lersch (Bonn, 1841), and H. 
Steinthal (Geschichte der Sprachwiss. bei den Griechen und Rémern, Berlin, 1863-64). Cf. 
Schoémann. Die Lehre von den Redetheilen bei den Alten, Berlin, 1862. 


§ 8. The efforts of the poetic fancy to represent to itself the nature 
and development of things divine and human precede, excite to, and 
prepare the way for philosophical inquiry. The influence of the 
theogonic and cosmogonic notions of Homer and Hesiod on the 
development of the earliest Greek philosophy was only remote and 
inconsiderable; but perhaps certain Orphic poesies, as also the 
Cosmology of Pherecydes of Syros (who first wrote in prose, about 
600 8. c.), and, on the other hand, the commencement of ethical reflec- 
tion, which manifested itself in proverbs and poems, exercised a more 
direct and essential influence. 


The numerous works relating to those phases of intellectual development, which preceded the advent 
of philosophy, can not here be named with any degree of fullness; it may suffice only to direct attention 
to K. F. Nagelsbach’s Homer. Theologie (Nuremberg, 1840) and his Nachhomerische Theologie, also to the 
works of Creuzer and Voss, the first volumes of Grote’s History of Grecce, the Populdre Aufsdtze of 
Lehrs, the works of Preller and others on Grecian Mythology, and various monographs, such as Ramdohr’s 
Zur Homerischen Ethik (Programm des Gymnas. zu Liineberg), ete. Cf. Lobeck, De Carminibus 
Orphicis, Kinigsb. 1824; De Orphet Acetate, ib. 1826; Agluophamus 8. de Theol. Myst. Graecorum 
Causis, 2 vols., ib. 1829; K. Eichhoff, De Onomacrito Atheriensi, Gymn.-Progr., Elberfeld, 1840; C. 
Haupt, Orpheus, Homerus, Onomacritus ; sive Theologiae et Philosophiae Initia apud Graccos, Gymn.- 
Progr., Kénigsberg in Neumark, 1864; J. A. Hartung, Die Religion und Mythologie der Griechen, 
Leips. 1865 (Hartung detects in Epimenides, the Cretan, and Onomacritus a confusion in matters of de- 
lief, due to the introduction of Egyptian, Phenician,and Phrygian superstitions); P. R. Schuster, De veteris 
Orphicae theogoniae indcle atque origine, accedit Hellanici theogonia Orphica, Leipsic, 1869. On 
Pherecydes, ef. Friedr. Wilh. Sturz (Gera, 1789; 1798), Leips. 1824; L. Preller, Die Theogonie des Ph. ὁ. δ. 
in the Rhein. Mus. f. Philol., new series, Vol. IV., 1846, pp. 377-389, and in Preller’s Ausgev. Aw/7s., ed. by 
R. Kohler, Berlin, 1864, pp. 350-361; R. Zimmermann, Ueber die Lehre des Ph. v. S. und thr Verhaltniss 
eu aussergriechischen Glaubenskreisen, in Fichte’s Zeitschr. f. Philos. Vol. 24, No. 2, 1854, and Joh. Con- 
rad, De Pherecydis Syrii Aetate atque Cosmologia (Diss. Bonnensis), Coblentz, 1856.—Karl Dilthey, 
Griech. Fragmente (Part I.: Fragments by the seven wise men, their contemporaries, and the Pytha- 
foreans), Darmstadt, 1835; H. Wiskemann, De ZLacedaemoniorwm Philosophia et Pihilosophis deque 
Septem quos dicunt Saprentibus, Lac. disciputlis et imitatoribus, Hersfeld. 18410: Otto Bernhardt. Die sieben 
Weisen Griecheniands, Gymn.-Progr., Soran, 1864: Fre. Aemil. Bohren, Pe Septem Sapientibus, Bonn, 
1807. 





THE EARLY POETS AND SAGES. 25 


The Homeric poems seem to imply an earlier form of religious ideas, the gods of which 
were personified forces of nature, and they recall in occasional particulars (6. g. Zl. ViIL., 
19sq., myth of the σειρὴ χρυσείη) Oriental speculations; but all such elements in them are 
without exception clothed in an ethical form. Homer draws thoroughly ideal pictures of 
human life, and the influence which his poetry in its pure naiveté exercised on the Hellenes 
(as also the less elevated influence of the more reflective poetry of Hesiod), was essentially 
ethical and religious. But when this education had accomplished its work in sufficient 
measure, the moral and religious consciousness of the race, increasing in depth and finding 
the earlier stadium insufficient, advanced to a more rigorously polemic attitude, and even 
proscribed the ideal of the past as a false, misleading, and pernicious agency (Xenophanes, 
Heraclitus, and Plato). After this followed a species of reconciliation which lasted during 
several centuries before the final rupture, but rested in part only on the delusive basis of 
allegorical interpretation. Greek philosophy made incomparably greater advances in 
that earlier polemic period than after its friendly return to the poetry of Homer and 
Hesiod. 

At a later time, when renewed speculation was again inclined to concede to the most 
ancient poetry the highest authority, the belief of earlier times, that the Homeric poetry 
was preceded by another of more speculative character, namely, the Orphic, found much 
credit. According to the primitive legend, Orpheus was the originator of the worship of 
Bacchus among the Thracians. Cosmogonic poems were early ascribed to him (by Ono- 
macritus, the favorite of the Pisistratidae, and others). Herodotus says (II. 53): “ Homer 
and Hesiod framed the theogony of the Hellenes; but the poets, who are believed to have 
lived before them, in my opinion, were their successors;” in II. 81 (ef. 123), Herodotus 
declares the so-called Orphic and Bacchie doctrines to be Egyptian and Pythagorean. 
Those Orphic cosmogonies of which we have most precise knowledge date from an epoch 
much later still, and arose under the influence of the later philosophy. It is, however, 
susceptible of sufficiently convincing demonstration, that one of the Cosmogonies origi- 
nated in a comparatively early period. Damascius, the Neo-Platonist, relates (De Prine. 
p. 382), that Eudemus, the Peripatetic, an immediate disciple of Aristotle, reported the 
substance of an Orphie theogony, in which nothing was said of the intelligible, owing to 
its being utterly inexpressible—so Damascius explains it from his stand-point—but the 
beginning was made with Night. We may certainly assume that Aristotle also was 
acquainted with this theogony (cf. also Plat. Tim., p. 40c). Now Aristotle says, Metaph., 
XIV. 4, that the ancient poets and the latest (philosophical) θεολόγοι represented (panthe- 
istically) what is highest and best as being not first, but second or subsequent in order 
of time, and resulting from a gradual development; while those, who (in point of time and 
in their modes of thought and expression) stood between the poets and the philosophers 
(οἱ μεμιγμένοι αὐτῶν), like Pherecydes, who no longer employed exclusively the language 
of mythology, and the magi and some Greek philosophers, regarded (theistically) that 
which is most perfect, as first in order of time. What “ancient” poets (ἀρχαῖοι ποιηταί, 
whose time, for the rest, may reach down, in the case of some of them, into the sixth cen- 
tury Β. 6.) are here meant, Aristotle indicates only by designating their principles: οἷον 
Νύκτα καὶ Οὐρανὸν ἢ Χάος ἢ ᾽Ὡκεανόν. Of these Χάος is undoubtedly to be referred to 
Hesiod (πάντων μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος yéver’, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Tai’ εὐρύστερνος x. τ. 2. Theog. V. 
116 sq. ; ἐκ Χάεος δ᾽ "Ἐρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο, ib. 123), ᾿ὥκεανός to Homer (Ὠκεανόν 
τε ϑεῶν γένεσιν καὶ μητέρα Ἰηϑύν, Il. XIV. 201; Il. XIV. 240: Ὠκεανός, ὥσπερ γένεσις 
πάντεσσι τέτυκται), and Νὺξ καὶ Οὐρανός, therefore, to some other well-known theogony, 
in all probability to the same Orphic theogony which was described by Eudemus; and 
jn this ease this theogony must have arisen, at the latest, in the sixth century before 


26 PERIODS OF DEVELOPMENT. 


Christ, since Aristotle reckons its author among the ‘ancient poets” (ποιηταὶ dpyaio). 
But this theogony, and indeed all the theogonies, to which the Aristotelian testimony 
assigns a comparatively high antiquity, agree substantially, according to the same authority, 
with the theogonies of Homer and Hesiod in their religious conceptions. Zeus appears 
as the eternal ruler of all and as the soul of the world, in the following verse, which is, 
most likely, the παλαιὸς λόγος to which Plato refers in Leg., IV. 715 e:— 


Ζεὺς ἀρχή, Leve μέσσα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐκ πάντα τέτυκται. 


Pherecydes, of the island of Syros (about 600-550 8. c.), wrote a theogony in prose, 
which is cited under the title of ‘Emrauvyoc, probably from the folds (μυχοῖς) of his κόσμος. 
Diogenes Laértius cites, as follows, the opening words of this work (I. 119): Ζεὺς μὲν καὶ 
Χρόνος εἰς ἀεὶ καὶ Χθὼν ἦν. XOovin dé ὄνομα ἐγένετο TH, ἐπειδὴ αὐτῇ Leve γέρας διδοῖ. 

The cosmologist, Epimenides, who was nearly contemporary with Pherecydes, describes 
the world as coming forth from night and air, and belongs consequently to those whom 
Aristotle designates as ἐκ νυκτὸς γεννῶντες θεολόγοι. Acusilaus made Chaos first, Erebus 
and Night being its children. Hermotimus of Clazomenae appears to have been one of the 
theistical cosmologists (see below, § 24). 

The so-called “Seven Wise Men,” Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon; Cleomenes, Myson 
(or, according to others, Periander), and Chilon (Anacharsis, Epimenides, and others are 
also named), with the sayings attributed to them (Thales: “‘ Know Thyself,” or, ‘ What is 
difficult? To know one’s self; and what is easy? To advise another;” Solon: “ Hold 
the beautiful and good more sacred than an oath;” ‘Speak not falsely;” “ Practice dili- 
gently things excellent; ” ‘Be slow in acquiring friends, but those thou hast taken, do not 
cast off; ” ‘‘ Learn to command by first learning to obey;”’ ‘Let thy advice be not what is 
most agreeable, but what is most honorable;” ‘ Nothing in excess;” Bias: ‘‘The posses- 
sion of power will bring out the man,” cited by Arist., Zth. Nic., V. 3, and “‘The most are 
bad,” ete.; Anacharsis: ‘Rule thy tongue, thy belly, thy sexual desires,” etc.), are repre- 
sentatives of a practical wisdom, which is not yet sufficiently reflective to be called philos- 
ophy, but which may pave the way for the philosophical inquiry after ethical principles. 
In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras (p. 343), the ‘Seven Wise Men” are spoken of as 
exponents of Lacedeemonian culture expressing itself in moral maxims. The Aristotelian 
Diczearch (ap. Diog. Laért., I. 40) terms these men, with reason, ‘‘neither sages nor philos- 
ophers, but rather men of broad common sense, and lawgivers (οὔτε σοφοὺς οὔτε φιλοσόφους, 
συνετοὺς δέ τίνας καὶ νομοθετικούς) Thales, who is occasionally mentioned as the wisest 
of the seven sages, was at once an astronomer and the founder of the Ionic Natural 
Philosophy. 


§ 9. The Periods of Development of Greek (and its derivative, 
Roman) philosophy may be characterized, in respect of the object of 
inquiry in each, as follows: Ist Period: Prevailing direction of phil- 
osophical inquiry toward the universe of nature, or predominance of 
Cosmology (from Thales to Anaxagoras and the Atomists); 2d Period: 
Prevailing direction of philosophical inquiry toward man, as a willing 
and thinking being, or predominance of Ethics and Logic—accom- 
panied, however, by the gradual resumption and a growing encour- 
agement of natural philosophy (from the Sophists to the Stoics, Epicu- 
reans, and Skeptics) ; 3d Period: Prevailing direction of philosophical 





PERIODS OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 27 


inquiry to the subject of the divine nature and the relation of the 
world and man to it, or predominance of Theosophy, but not excluding 
physics, ethics, and logic (from Neo-Pythagoreanism till the exit of 
ancient philosophy in the Neo-Platonic school). As to the form of 
philosophy in the successive periods, the first period was charac- 
terized, in the main, by the immediate direction of thought to things, 
though not without some attempts at mathematical and dialecti- 
cal demonstration; the second, by the introduction of the Definition as 
an organ of inquiry, and the third by the prevalence of the idea of 
mystical absorption in the Absolute. The germs of the peculiar con- 
tent and also of the form of philosophy in each of the later periods are 
discernible partly at the culmination and partly at the termination of 
the period in each case next preceding ; the most eminent thinkers of 
the second (in most of its representatives, prevailingly anthropological) 
period rose nearest to a comprehensive philosophy. In the first period, 
the persons representing the same or similar types of philosophy were, 
as arule (though by no means without exception), of the same race (the 
earliest natural philosophy having arisen and flourished among the 
Ionians, while Pythagoreanism found its adherents chiefly among the 
Dorians). But in the second period philosophical types became inde- 
pendent of race-distinctions, especially after the formation at Athens 
of a center of philosophical activity. The home of philosophy was 
now coextensive with the Hellenic world, including in the latter 
those nations subjected to the Macedonian or Roman supremacy, in 
which the Hellenic type of culture remained predominant. In the 
third period, the Hellenic mode of thought was blended with the 
Oriental and the representatives of philosophy (now become theos- 
ophy) were either Jews under Hellenic influence, Egyptians and 
other Orientals, or men Hellenic in race who were deeply impregnated 
with Orientalism. 


Diogenes of Laérta (whose arrangement is based on an unintelligent and exaggerated 
use of the distinction of Ionic and Italic philosophy) repeats (III. 56) an observation, 
which had been made by others before him, and which is worthy of note, to the effect 
that the first λόγος of the Greek philosophers was physical, while Ethics was added by 
Socrates, and Dialectic by Plato. 

Brucker follows substantially the arrangement of Diogenes Laértius, but begins a new 
period with philosophy under the Romans. In this period he includes, beside the Roman 
philosophers, the renewers of earlier schools, especially the Neo-Pythagoreans and the so- 
called “‘ Eclectic Sect” (so termed by him after Diog. Laért., I. 21, where Potamo is spoken 
of as founder of an eclectic school), 7. 6. the Neo-Platonists, and also the later Peripatetics, 
Cynics, etc., and the Jewish, Arabian, and Christian philosophers down to the end of the 


98 PERIODS OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 


Middle Ages, the restoration of the sciences, and the commencement of modern phi- 
losophy. 

Tennemann divides Greek and Roman philosophy into three periods: 1. From Thales 
to Socrates—beginning in fragmentary speculations concerning the external world; 2. 
From Socrates to the end of the contest between the Stoa and the Academy—in which 
period speculation was called off from nature and directed to the human mind as the 
source of all truth; 3. From philosophy under the Romans and the New Skepticism of 
/Enesidemus to John of Damascus—the period of the marriage of the Western with the 
Oriental mind, when men looked outside of the mind for the source of certitude and 
declined into syncretism and fanaticism. 

Similarly, H. Ritter distinguishes three periods of philosophical development: Pre- 
Socratic Philosophy, the Socratic Schools (among which he includes the earlier Skeptics, 
Epicureans, and Stoics) and the Later Philosophy down to Neo-Platonism. The first 
period includes “the first awakening of the philosophic spirit,” the second, “the most 
perfect bloom of philosophical systems,” the third, “the downfall of Greek philosophy.” 
More precisely, the first period is characterized, according to Ritter, by the one-sided scien- 
tific interest, from which in it philosophical inquiry departs, its variety of direction being 
determined by variety of race; the second, by the complete systematic division of philoso- 
phy (or at least ‘of that which the Greeks generally understood by philosophy ”) into its 
various branches, the different races no longer philosophizing each in its own way, but 
“this philosophy being brought forth, as it were, from the intellectual totality of the Greek 
nation ;” the third, by the loss of the sense of the systematic order essential to Greek 
philosophy, although the tradition of it was preserved, and by the decadence of the 
peculiarity and vigor of the Greek mind, while scientific discipline was gradually covering 
a greater range of experiences and being extended to a greater number of men. Ritter’s 
classification is based essentially on Schleiermacher’s estimate of the philosophical signifi- 
cance of Socrates, namely, that Socrates, by his principle of knowledge, rendered possible 
the union of the previously isolated branches of philosophical inquiry in an all-emoracing 
philosophical system, which union Plato was the first to realize. In accordance herewith, 
Schleiermacher divides Greek philosophy, in his Lectures edited by Ritter, into two 
periods, entitled ‘‘ Pre-Socratic Philosophy,” and “ Philosophy from Socrates to the Neo- 
Platonists ;” yet he sometimes himself subdivides the latter period into two periods, one 
of bloom, the other of decay. 

Brandis agrees, on the whole, with Ritter in his appreciation of the development of 
Greek philosophy, yet with the not immaterial difference, that he transfers the Stoics and 
Epicureans and the Pyrrhonie and Academie Skeptics from the second period of develop- 
ment (‘‘the time of manly maturity”) to the third (“ the period of decline”), 

Hegel distinguishes three periods: 1. From Thales to Aristotle; 2. Grecian philosophy 
in the Roman world; 3. The Neo-Platonic philosophy. The first period extends from 
the commencement of philosophizing thought till its development and perfection into a 
scientific whole and into the whole of science. In the second period philosophical 
science becomes split up into particular systems; each system is a theory of the universe 
founded entirely on a one-sided principle, a partial truth being carried to the extreme 
in opposition to its complementary truth and so expanded into a totality in itself 
(systems of Stoicism and Epicureanism, of whose dogmatism Skepticism constitutes the 
negative face). The third period is, with reference to the preceding one, the affirmative 
period, in which what was before opposed becomes now harmoniously united in a divine 
ideal world. Hegel distributes the first period into three sections: a. From Thales to 
Anaxagoras, or from abstract thought, as immediately determined by its (external) object, 





PRE-SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 29 


to the idea of thought as determining itself; b. Sophists, Socrates, and disciples of 
Socrates—thought which determines itself, is apprehended as present, as concrete in me— 
principle of subjectivity; c. Plato and Aristotle—thought objective, the Idea, occupies the 
whole sphere of being (with Plato, only in the form of universality, but with Aristotle, as 
a fact confirmed in every sphere of real existence). 

Zeller’s first period extends from Thales to the Sophists, inclusive. The second 
includes Socrates and his incomplete disciples, Plato and the Old Academy, Aristotle and 
the earlier Peripatetics. All Post-Aristotelian philosophy is included in the third. In the 
first period all philosophy takes an immediately objective direction. In the second period 
the fundamental notion is that of the objectivity of ideas or of thought as per se existing, 
in which Socrates recognized the supreme end of subjective endeavor, Plato the absolute, or 
substantial reality, and Aristotle not simply the essence, but also the forming and moving 
principle of the empirically real. In the third period ail independent speculation centers 
in the question of the truth of subjective thought and the manner of life calculated to 
bring subjective satisfaction; thought withdraws from the object-world into itself. Even 
Neo-Platonism, whose essential character is to be sought in the transcendent theosophy 
which it embodied and for which Skepticism prepared the way, furnishes, in Zeller’s 
opinion, no exception to the subjective character of the third period, since its constant and 
all-controlling concern is the inward satisfaction of the subject. 

No division can be regarded as truly satisfactory, in which reference is not had, so far 
as practicable, at once to the prevailing object, the form and the geographical localization 
of philosophy in the different periods. 


First (Prevartinety Cosmonoaicat) Prrtop or Grex ΡΗΙΠΟΒΟΡΗΥ͂. 
PRE-SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 


§ 10. The first period of Greek Philosophy includes, 1) the earlier 
Tonic Natural Philosophers, 2) the Pythagoreans, 3) the Eleatics, 4) the 
later Natural Philosophers. The Ionic “ physiologists,” predisposed 
thereto by their racial character as Ionians, directed their attention to 
the sphere of sensible phenomena and inquired after the material prin- 
ciple of things and the manner of their generation and decay ; for 
them, matter was in itself living and psychically endowed. The Pytha- 
goreans, whose doctrines flourished chiefly among the Greeks of Doric 
race, especially in Lower Italy, sought for a principle of things which 
should account at once for their form and substance, and found it in 
number and figure. The philosophy of the Eleatics turned on the 
unity and immutability of being. The later natural philosophers were 
led by the antithesis in which the Eleatic speculation stood to the 


80 PRE-SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY, 


earlier natural philosophy, to attempt a mediation; to this end, they 
admitted, on the one hand, the Eleatic doctrine of the immutability of 
being, but affirmed, on the other, with the Pre-Eleatic philosophers, its 
plurality, and explained its apparent changes as due to the combina- 
tion or severance of immutable, primitive elements. With the last 
representatives of natural philosophy and, especially, in the doctrine 
of Anaxagoras concerning the independent existence and world- 
disposing power of the divine mind (Νοῦς), the way was already being 
prepared for the transition to the following period. 


Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum (of the time before Socrates), ed. Fr. Guil. Mullach, Paris, 
1860, Vol. 11.. ἐδέᾳ. 1867. 

H. Ritter, Geschichte der Jonischen Philosophie, Berlin, 1821, Chr. A. Brandis, Ueber die Reihen- 
Solge der Ionischen Physiologen, in the Rhein. Mus., 111. pp. 105 seq. Mallet, Histoire dela Philosophie 
Tonienne, Paris, 1842. K. F. Hermann, De Philosophorwm Ionicorwm Aetatibus, Gott. 1849, 

Ed. Roth, Geschichte unserer abendldindischen Philosophie, 2d vol.(Greek Philosophy. The earliest 
Ionic thinkers and Pythagoras), Mannheim, 1858, 2d ed., 1862. 

Aug. Gladisch, Die Pythagoreer und die Schinesen, Posen, 1841; Die Hleaten und die Indier, ibid. 
1844; Die Religion und die Philosophie in ihrer weltgeschichtlichen Entwickelung, Breslau, 1852; 
Empedokles und die Aegypter, Leipsic, 1858; Herakleitos und Zorouster, Leips. 1859; Anaxagoras und. 
die Israéliten, Leipsic, 1854; Die Hyperboreer und die alten Schinesen, eine historische Untersuchung, 
Leips. 1866. 

Max Schneidewin, Ueber die Keime erkenntnisstheoretischer und ethischer Philosopheme bei den 
vorsokrat. Denkern (G.-Progr.), Arnstadt, 1868, and in Bergmann’s Philos. Monatshefte, Vol. 11., Ber- 
lin, 1869. 


As a result of the peculiar cosmological principles adopted by the Pythagoreans and 
Eleatics, Ethics appeared already in germ among the former and Dialectic among the 
latter. Yet the Pythagorean and Eleatic philosophies are scarcely, for that reason, to be 
termed (with Schleiermacher) respectively ethical and dialectical in their fundamental 
character. These philosophies are, rather, like the speculation of the Ionians, essentially 
cosmological, and their ethical and dialectical tendencies result only from the manner in 
which they seek to solve the cosmological problem. The Pythagoreans brought, not 
ethics, but only the mathematico-philosophical theory of nature under a scientific form, and 
the Eleatics produced no theory of dialectics. 

In his work entitled Philolaos des Pythagoreers Lehren (Berlin, 1819, p. 40 sq.), Boeckh 
compares the different types of Greek philosophy in the first period with the characteristics 
of the races, in which the several types were developed, with the following result. In the 
materialistic view of the principles of things and of the manifold life and activity 
of the material elements, as held by the Ionic philosophers, Boeckh finds an expres- 
sion of the sensuousness of the Ionians, of their attachment to the external, of their 
sensibility to external impressions, and of their lively, mobile disposition. The Dorie 
character, on the contrary, was marked by that inward depth, from which springs vigorous 
action, and by a quiet but persistent adherence to fixed and almost indestructible forms. 
This character manifested itself in the tendency to ethical reflection and speculation— 
although the latter never rose to the form of a developed theory—and more especially in 
the circumstance, that the Doric thinkers sought to explain the nature of things by 
adducing, not a material, but a formal principle, a principle which should account for their 
unity and order. Thus Pythagoras was said to be the first to call the world Cosmos, and, in 
conformity with the peculiarity of the Doric character, in conformity even with the spirit of 





THE IONIC NATURAL ΡΗΙΠΟΒΟΡΗΕΒΒ. 31 


the government under which they lived, the philosophy of the Dorians assumed, externally, 
the form of a confederation or order. Philosophy, says Boeckh, from its sensuous begin- 
ning among the Ionians, passed through the intermediate stage of Pythagoreanism (mathe- 
matical intuition) to the non-sensuous doctrine of Plato, who had in the Eleatics able but 
too one-sided predecessors, and who, by the Socratic method of criticism, limiting and 
correcting not only the Eleatic philosophy, but also the other philosophies, the one by 
the other, evolved from them the most perfect system which the Hellenic mind was 
capable of producing. Boeckh draws the following parallel between the successive theories 
held in regard to the principles of things, and the degrees of the dialectical scale given by 
Plato (see below, § 41): the poetic-mythical symbols of the period previous to the exist- 
ence of philosophy proper, correspond with eixacia, the Ionians investigate the realm of 
things sensible, the αἰσθητά, the Pythagoreans investigate the mathematical order of 
things, the διανοητά, and the Eleatics the purely spiritual, intelligible, the νοητά. The 
influence of Eleaticism on the doctrines of the later natural philosophers has been espe- 
cially pointed out by Zeller (who, however, still separates Heraclitus from the earlier 
Tonians). . 

To what extent the philosophy of this period (and hence the genesis of Greek philos- 
ophy in general) was affected by Oriental influences, is a problem whose definite solution 
can only be anticipated as the result of the further progress of Oriental and, especially, of 
Egyptological investigations. It is certain, however, that the Greeks did not meet with 
fully developed and completed philosophical systems among the Orientals. The only 
question can be whether and in what measure Oriental religious ideas occasioned in the 
speculation of Grecian thinkers (especially on the subject of God and the human soul) a 
deviation from the national type of Hellenic culture and gave it its direction toward the 
invisible, the inexperimental, the transcendent (a movement which culminated in Pytha- 
goreanism and Platonism). In later antiquity, Jews, Neo-Pythagoreans, Neo-Platonists, 
and Christians unhistorically over-estimated the influence of the Orient in this regard. 
Modern criticism began early to set aside such estimates as exaggerated, and critics have 
manifested an increasing tendency to search for the explanation of the various philoso- 
phemes of the Greeks in the progressive, inner development of the Greek mind; but, in 
their care not to exaggerate the results of external influences, they have verged perhaps too 
near to the opposite extreme. The labors of R6th and Gladisch mark a reaction against 
this extreme, both of them again laying stress on the influence of the Orient. But Réth’s 
combinations, which by their audacity are capable of bribing the imagination, involve too 
much that is quite arbitrary. Gladisch concerns himself, primarily, rather with the com- 
parison of Greek philosophemes with Oriental religious doctrines, than with the demon- 
stration of their genesis; so far as he expresses himself in regard to the latter, he does 
not affirm a direct transference of the Oriental element in ihe time of the first Greek 
philosophers, but only maintains that this element entered into Greek philosophy through 
the medium of the Greek religion; Oriental tradition, he argues, must have been received 
in a religious form by the Hellenes in very early antiquity, and so become blended with 
their intellectual life; the regeneration of the Hindu consciousness in the Eleatics, of the 
Chinese in the Pythagoreans, ete., was, however, proximately an outgrowth from the 
Hellenic character itself. But this theory has little value. It is much easier either for those 
who deny altogether that any essential influence was exerted on the Greek mind from the 
Kast, or for those who affirm, on the contrary, that such an influence was directly trans- 
mitted through the contact of the earlier Greek philosophers with Oriental nations, to 
explain the resemblance, so far as it exists, between the different Greek philosophies and 
various Oriental types of thought, than for Gladisch, from his stand-point, to explain the 


32 THALES OF MILETUS AND HIPPO. 


separate reproduction of the latter in the former. For the ethical and anthropomorphitic 
character impressed by the Greek poets upon the mythology of their nation was of such a 
character as to efface, not merely all traces of the influence of different Oriental nations 
in the religion of the Greeks, but all traces of Oriental origin whatsoever. The hypothesis 
of a direct reception of Chinese doctrines by Pythagoras, or of Hindu doctrines by Xe- 
nophanes, would indeed belong to the realm of the fanciful. But that Pythagoras, and 
perhaps also Empedocles, appropriated to themselves Egyptian doctrines and usages 
directly from Egypt, that possibly Anaxagoras, or perhaps even Hermotimus, his prede- 
cessor, came in contact with Jews, that Thales, as also, at a later epoch, Democritus, 
sought and found in Egypt or in Babylonia material for scientific theories, that Heraclitus 
was led to some of his speculations by a knowledge of Parseeism, and that therefore the 
later philosophers, so far as they join on to these, were indirectly (Plato also directly) 
affected in the shaping of their doctrines by Oriental influences, is quite conceivable, and 
some of these hypotheses have no slight degree of probability. 


§ 11. The philosophy of the earlier Ionic physiologists is Hylozo- 
ism, 7. ¢., the doctrine of the immediate unity of matter and life, 
according to which matter is by nature endowed with life, and life is 
inseparably connected with matter. 

This development-series includes, on the one hand, Thales, Anaxi- 
mander, and Anaximenes, who sought mainly the material principle 
of things, and, on the other, Heraclitus, who laid the principal stress 
on the process of development or of origin and decay. 


Rud. Seydel, Dex Fortschritt der Metaphysik unter den dltesten Ionischen Philosophen, Leips. 1861. 


In justification of the inclusion of Heraclitus in this series, cf. below, §§ 15 and 22. 


§ 12. Thales of Miletus, of Phenician descent and born in or 
about Olympiad 35 (640 8. ο.), is distinguished by Aristotle as the 
originator of the Ionic Natural Philosophy (and hence indirectly also 
of Greek philosophy in general). The fundamental doctrine of his 
philosophy of nature is thus expressed: Water is the original source 
of all things. 

The later philosopher, Hippo of Samos, or of Rhegium, a physicist 
of the time of Pericles, also saw in water, or the moist, the principle 
of all things. 


Some of the earlier historians of philosophy—as Brucker, notably—treat very fully of 7hales, but 
without the requisite degree of criticism. The opuscule of the Abbé de Canaye on Thales may be con- 
sulted in the Mémoires de Littérature, t. X., or in German, in Michael Hissman’s Magazin, Vol. I., pp. 
309-444; cf. further J. H. Miller (Altd. 1719), Déderlin (1750), Plouequet (Tub. 1763), Harless (Erlang., 
1780-84), Flatt (De Theismo Thaleti Milesio abjudicando, Tub. 1785), Geo. Fr. Dan. Goess ( Veber den 
Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophie, und tiber das System des Thales, Erlangen, 1794), and, recently, 
F. Decker (De Thalete Milesio, Inaugural Diss., Halle, 1865); οὗ also, besides Ritter, Brandis, Zeller, and 
other historians, Aug. Bernhard Krische, Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der alten Philos., I., pp. 84-42. It 
remained for the most recent investigators to return to the testimony of Aristotle, and measure later testi- 
mony by his. 

On Héppo, ef. Schleiermacher (Untersuchung tiber den Philosophen Hippon, read in the Berlin Acad. 








THALES OF MILETUS AND HIPPO, 7 33 


of Sciences on the 14th of Febr., 1820; published in Schleiermacher’s Sdmmtliche Werke, Abth. IIL, vol. 3, 
Berlin, 1835, pp. 403-410), and Wilh. Uhrig (De Hippone Atheo, Giessen, 1848). 


For determining the time of Thales’ life, a datum is furnished in the report that he 
predicted an eclipse of the sun, which took place in the reign of the Lydian king Alyattes 
(Herod., I. 74). The date of this eclipse, according to the supposition of Baily (Philosoph. 
Transactions, 1811) and Oltmanns (Abh. der Berl. Akad. d. Wiss., 1812-13), is September 30, 
610 8. C., but, according to Bosanquet, Hind, Airy (Philos. Trans., vol. 143, Ὁ. 119 5α.), and 
Jul. Zech (J. Zech’s Astron. Untersuchungen tiber die wichtigeren Finsternisse, welche von den 
Schriftstellern des class. Alterthums erwaéhnt werden, Leipsic, 1853), May 28, 585 B.c.* The 
latter date is defended by P. A. Hansen (Darlegung der theoret. Berechnung der in den Mond- 
tafeln angewandten Storungen, zweite abhandlung, in the 7th vol. of the Abhandlungen der 
math.-phys. Cl. der K. Sichs. Ges. der Wiss., Leips. 1864, pp. 379 sq.). With it agrees also the 
supposition adopted, according to Diog. Laért. (I. 22), by Demetrius Phalereus in his List 
of Archons (avaypagy τῶν ἀρχόντων), that Thales was named σοφός, while Damasias was 


* Zech and others write 584; but the year denoted in astronomical usage by this number is the same as 
that designated in the ordinary and approvable practice of historians as 585 Β. o., ἡ. εις the 585th year before 
the conventional point of departure of our chronology, which lies about 1324 years before the day of the 
Emperor Augustus’s death (Aug. 19, A. p. 14). Zech follows the custom introduced among astronomers 
by Jacob Cassini (cf. Ideler’s landbuch der Chronologie, p. 75, and Lehrbuch, p. 39 sq.) of designating 
every year before the birth of Christ by a number one less than the usual one. This mode of designation 
(which is in so far defensible, as according to it the 25th Dee. of the year + ὦ 18 removed by + ὦ years from 
the beginning of the era) is, it is true, convenient for the purposes of astronomical calculation, but deviates 
from historic usage, and is even itself in so far less appropriate, as it (not to mention how few days of the 
year fall after the 25th of December, which, as the presumptive birthday of Jesus, itself formed the point of 
departure in the new division of the years, according to the original and in principle unchanged intention) 
makes the year + 1 the first year after the beginning of the Christian era, but the year — 1, the second 
year before the beginning of this era; in the former every day is distant 0 years and a fraction, but in the 
latter 1 year and a fraction from the commencement of our era. According to this astronomical usage, the 
year, near the end of which the birth of Jesus is placed, is numbered 0, the whole of it, with the exception 
of the last days of December, falling before the birth of Christ. According to this reckoning, the year — @ 
is the year after which, without counting that year itself, @ years are counted till the birth of Christ; the 
year + @ ought consistently to be the year, up to which, withont counting that year, @ years are reckoned 
from the same date; and there ought, therefore, to be a year 0 after Christ, which the astronomer is never- 
theless as far as the historian from positing. The historical usage is perfectly consequent in making the 
year 1 after the birth of Christ follow immediately on the year 1 B. c. as the first year of the era; this usage 
we follow here without exception. 

The above are the Julian dates. It is customary to extend backward the Julian Calendar and not the 
Gregorian, in reckoning ancient time. Yet the reduction of all historical dates to Gregorian dates affords 
the by no means unessential advantage of making the equinoxes and solstices in the earliest historical 
times fall in the same months and on the same days as now. The historian, at least (who, for the rest, 
always deviates from the practice of the astronomer in the indication of years and days), ought to give 
ancient dates according to the Gregorian Calendar. In order to make the reduction, the provisions which 
were made at the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar (in 1582, when the 15th of October was made to 
follow immediately upon the 4th) for the future, and with reference to a portion of the past (viz.: that in 
every 400 years three interealary days of the Julian Calendar should fall away, namely, in the years whose 
numbers are divisible by 100 and not by 400 withont remainder), must be applied also to the earlier past. 
For the eclipse of Thales the Gregorian date, thus determined, is May 22, 585 n. c. 

In like manner the Julian dates in § 89, § 61, ete., should be reduced to the Gregorian. From the Julian 
date for the years 601 to 501 3B. ο. ὃ days are to be subtracted, from 501 to 801 B. c. 5 days, 301 to 201, 4 days, 
201 to 101, 8 days, 101 B. c. to A. τ. 100, 2 days, a. p. 100 to 200, 1 day. For the years a. p. 200 to 500, one 
day is to be added, 500 to 600,2 days, ete. Yet it would be, perhaps, still better to carry out Midler’s 
proposal and modify the Gregorian Calendar throughout, so that at the end of every 128 years an inter- 
ealary day of the Julian Calendar should fall away. The advantage of this reform would be greater 
exactness in the demarcation of the seasons of the year, less uncertainty in the citation of early historical 
dates, and perhaps also a diminution of the difficulty of harmonizing the Russo-Greek and occidental 
calendars. 


3 


84 THALES OF MILETUS AND HIPPo, 


Archon at Athens (586-5 B. c.). Apollodorus, in his Chronicle (according to Diog. Laért., 
J, 37), places his birth in Olympiad 35. 1 (640-639 8. C.). 

It is possible that Thales had learned of the Saros,, 7. e. the period of the eclipses, dis- 
covered after prolonged observation by the Chaldeans, and covering 233 synodic months, 
or 6585} days, or that he even knew of the greater period of 600 years. Yet on the basis 
of this Saros, eclipses of the moon only, and not eclipses of the sun, could be foreknown 
with a sufficient degree of probability, for any determinate locality, and the prediction 
ascribed to Thales is therefore probably only a legend, which arose perhaps from his 
scientific explanation of the eclipse of the sun after it had taken place. Cf. Henri Martin, 
Sur quelques prédictions d'éclipses mentionnées par des auteurs anciens, in the Revue Archéo- 
logique, [X., 1864, pp. 170-199. 

Thales belonged (according to Diog. L., I. 22) to the family of the Thelides (ἐκ τῶν 
θηλιδῶν), whose ancestor was Cadmus the Phenician, and who emigrated (according to 
Herod., I. 146) from Thebes to Ionia. Thales distinguished himself not only in the region 
of scientific investigation, but also in political affairs; he is reported, in particular, to have 
dissuaded the Milesians from allying themselves with Croesus against Cyrus (Herod., I. 
75; 170; Diog. L., I. 25). The writings which were in later times attributed to Thales 
(ναυτικὴ ἀστρολογία and others), had (according to Diog. L., I. 23) already been declared 
spurious by some in antiquity. Aristotle speaks, probably, only from the reports of others, 
of his fundamental philosophical doctrine, and only conjecturally of the argumentation by 
which he supported it. 

Aristotle says, Metaph., I. 3: “ΟΥ̓ those who first philosophized, the majority assumed 
only material principles or elements, Thales, the originator of such philosophy (Θαλῆς ὁ 
τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς φιλοσοφίας), taking water for his principle. He was led to this, prob- 
ably, by the observation, that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is 
generated by moisture, and living beings live by it;—but that by which any thing is 
generated is its principle;—further, by the observation that the seed of all things is 
naturally moist; but the principle, in virtue of which the moist is moist, is water.” In the 
same place and in De Coelo, II. 13, Aristotle reports that Thales represented the earth 
as floating on the water. It is possible that the geognostic observations (as of sea-shells 
in mountains) also lay at the bottom of Thales’ doctrine. 

Arist., De Anima, I. 2: ‘‘ According to Thales, the magnet is animated, because it attracts 
iron.” Ibid. 1.5: ‘Thales believed that all things were filled with gods” (πάντα πλήρη θεῶν 
elva). Aristotle does not in this place affirm that the doctrine had been professed by 
Thales, that ‘‘soul is mixed with all things,” but only says conjecturally, that perhaps 
such a conception was the ground of his belief in the universal presence of the gods. 
Cicero’s conception of the doctrine of Thales (De Nat. Deorum, I. 10) is unhistorical : 
“Thales Milesius aquam dixtt esse initium rerum, dewm autem eam mentem, quae ex aqua 
cuncta fingeret;’ for the Dualism here expressed, which stands in direct opposition to 
Hylozoism, belongs, according to the express testimony of Aristotle (Metaph., I. 3), to 
none of the earlier physiologists, Anaxagoras (and Hermotimus) being the first dualists. 

Thales is said to have first taught geometry in Hellas. Proclus says (Ad Huclid., p. 19) 
that arithmetic arose among the Phenicians and geometry among the Egyptians, and adds: 
Θαλῆς δὲ πρῶτον εἰς Αἴγυπτον ἐλϑὼν μετήγαγεν εἰς τὴν Ἑλλάδα τὴν ϑεωρίαν ταύτην Kai 
πολλά μὲν αὐτὸς εὗρε, πολλῶν δὲ τὰς ἀρχὰς τοῖς μετ᾽ αὐτὸν ὑφηγήσατο, τοῖς μὲν καϑολικώτερον 
ἐπιβάλλων, τοῖς δὲ αἰσϑητικώτερον. Proclus attributes to him, in particular, four propo- 
sitions (following, for Nos. 3 and 4, according to his express statement, and probably also 
for Nos. 1 and 2, the authority of Eudemus, an immediate pupil of Aristotle): 1. That 
the circle is halved by its diameter (ἐδ. p. 44); 2. That the angles at the base of an isosceles 


ree 


ee Te 





ee Ie Sing hee eT ΡΒ 






Se et ee ee 


SEO ee τ 


ANAXIMANDER OF MILETUS. 35 


triangle are equal to each other (p. 67); 3. That the opposite angles formed by intersecting 
lines are equal to each other (p. 79); 4. That two triangles are congruent, when one side 
and two angles of the one are equal to the corresponding parts of the other (p. 92). The 
report (Plutarch., Conviv. Septem Sap., c. 2), that he taught the Egyptian priests how to 
measure at any time the height of the pyramids by their shadows presupposes that he 
was acquainted with the theorem of the proportionality of the sides of similar triangles. 
According to Diog. L., I, 24sq., the proposition, that the angle inscribed in a semicircle is a 
right angle, was by some attributed to Thales, by others to Pythagoras. On the begin- 
nings of geometry among the Egyptians, cf. Herod. II. 109; Plat., Phaedr., p. 274; Arist., 
Metaph., I. 1, Ὁ. 981b, 23; Strabo, XVII. 3 (ed. Mein.). 

The reason, according to Aristotle, why philosophy begins with Thales, is that in his 
attempt to explain the world, a scientific tendency is first manifested, in opposition to the 
mythical form, which prevailed in the works of the ancient poets, and, to a great extent, 
in those of Pherecydes also. Still, many problems remained too comprehensive for the 
immediate attainment of a strictly scientific solution. 

Of Hippo (who, according to a Scholion to Aristoph., Nub., 96,—cited by Th. Bergk, 
Comm. de Reliquits Comoediae Att., Leips. 1838—was ridiculed by Cratinus in the πανόπταε) 
Aristotle speaks seldom and not with praise. He calls him a very ordinary man 
(φορτικώτερον, De Anima, I. 2), and says that on account of his shallowness (διὰ τὴν εὐτέλειαν 
αὐτοῦ τῆς διανοίας) he can scarcely be reckoned among the philosophers (Metaph., I. 3). 


§ 13. Anaximander of Miletus, born Olymp. 42.2 (= 611 8. c.), 
first, among the Greeks, composed a work “on Nature.” He teaches: αὶ 
“ All things must in equity again decline into that whence they have). ᾿ς 
their origin; for they must give satisfaction and atonement for injus- ἢ, | 
tice, each in the order of time.” Anaximander first expressly gave Pid les tl 
the assumed original material substance of things the name of prin- οὐ, 
ciple (ἀρχή). As such principle he posits a matter, undetermined in) Δ 
quality (and infinite in quantity), the ἄπειρον. From it the elementary 
contraries, warm and cold, moist and dry, are first separated, in such 
manner that homogeneous elements are brought together. Through 
an eternal motion, there arise, as condensations of air, innumerable 
worlds, heavenly divinities, in the center of which rests the earth, a 
cylinder in form and unmoved on account of its equal remoteness 
from all points in the celestial sphere. The earth, according to 
Anaximander, has been evolved from an originally fluid state. Living 
beings arose by gradual development out of the elementary moisture, 
under the influence of heat. Land animals had, in the beginning, the 
form of fishes, and only with the drying up of the surface of the earth 
did they acquire their present form. Anaximander is said to have 
described the soul as aériform, — pry εἴράλα. ι 


᾿ 
Ι 


᾽ 
ts 


Schleiermacher, Ueber Anawimandros (read in the Berlin Acad. of Sciences, Nov. 11, 1811), in the 
Abh. der philos. Cl., Berlin, 1815, and in Vol. 11. of the 8d Div. of the Complete Works of S., Berlin, 1838, 
pp. 171-296, Of., besides the essay by the Abbé de Canaye (German in Hissmann’s Magazin), Krische’s 
Forschungen, I., pp. 42-52, and Biisgen, Ueber das ἄπειρον Anawimanders (G. Pr.), Wiesbaden, 1867. 


90 i ANAXIMANDER OF MILETUS. 


For determining the time of Anaximander’s birth we have only the statement of Apol- 
lodorus to rest upon, who says (Diog. Laért., 11. 2), that in the second year of the 58th 
Olymp. (547-546 B. c.) Anaximander was 64 years old; according to this, he must have 
been born in Ol, 42.2 (611-610 B. c.). He occupied himself with astronomy and geography, 
made a geographical map (according to Eratosthenes, ap. Strabo, I. p. 7) and also an astro- 
nomical globe (σφαῖρα, Diog. L., II. 2), and invented the sun-dial (γνώμων, Diog. L., II. 1), 
or rather, since this instrument was already in use among the Babylonians (Herod., IZ. 
109), made it known to the Greeks and, in particular, introduced it into Lacedsemon. 
From a work of his, the following sentence (probably changed into the oratio obliqua by 
the narrator) is preserved (ap. Simplicius, Jn Arist. Phys., fol. 6a): ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι 
τοῖς οὖσι, Kai τὴν φϑορὰν εἰς ταὐτὰ γίνεσϑαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών" διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ τίσιν καὶ δίκην τῆς 
ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν. (Definite individual existence, as such, is represented 
as an ἀδικία, injustice, which must be atoned for by extinction.) 

With the ἄπειρον, or ‘‘ Infinite,” of Anaximander are connected several disputed questions. 
The most important is, whether the ἄπειρον is to be understood as a miature of all distinct 
elementary substances, from which the various individual things were mechanically sifted 
out (Ritter’s view), or, as a simple and qualitatively indeterminate matter, in which the 
different material elements were contained only potentially (as Herbart and the majority 
of recent historians suppose). The Aristotelian references, taken by themselves, might 
seem to conduct to the former conclusion. Aristotle says, Phys., I. 4: οἱ δ᾽ ἐκ τοῦ ἑνὸς 
ἐνούσας τὰς ἐναντιότητας ἐκκρίνεσϑαι (λέγουσιν), ὥσπερ ᾿Αναξίμανδρός φησι καὶ ὅσοι δ᾽ ἕν καὶ 
πολλά φασιν εἶναι, ὥσπερ ᾿Εμπεδοκλῆς καὶ ᾿Αναξαγόρας. The doctrine with which this is set in 
contrast, is (that of Anaximenes and other natural philosophers), that the manifold world of 
things was formed from the one original substance by condensation and rarefaction (Arist. 
Metaph., XII. 2: καὶ τοῦτ᾽ ἐστὶ τὸ ᾿Αναξαγόρου év . . «καὶ ᾿Εμπεδοκλέους τὸ μῖγμα καὶ ᾿Αναξι- 
μάνδρου). In Metaph., I. 8 (§§ 19 and 20, ed. Schw.), Aristotle seems to attribute the theory 
of an ἀόριστον, or an indefinite, unqualified first substance, only to later, Post-Anaxagorean 
philosophers (with special reference to the Platonists). But the statement of Theophrastus, 
reported by Simplicius (Arist. Phys., fol. 33), that, provided the mixture asserted by Anax- 
agoras be conceived as one substance, undetermined in kind and quantity, it forms an 
ἄπειρον like that of Anaximander (εἰ δέ τις τὴν μῖξιν τῶν ἁπάντων ὑπολάβοι μίαν εἶναι φύσιν 
ἀόριστον καὶ κατ᾽ εἶδος καὶ κατὰ μέγεϑος͵,---φαίνεται τὰ σωματικὰ στοιχεῖα παραπλησίως ποιῶν 
᾿Αναξιμάνδρῳ), is decidedly favorable to the second view. And this view alone accords with 
the logical consequence of the system. For the first would require, in addition to the mix- 
ture, a νοῦς, or controlling mind, which yet Anaximander does not assume; unmistakable 
witness is borne to his Hylozoism by Aristotle, in Phys., IIT. 4, according to which passage 
he taught of the a7ecpov, that itself was the Divine, and that it embraced and governed 
all things. It is probable that Anaximander expressed himself with as little distinctness 
respecting the nature of his decpov as did Hesiod respecting his Chaos, and that this 
accounts for the uncertainty in the statements of the different authorities. 

A second question in dispute igs whether or not the ἄπειρον of Anaximander is a sub- 
stance intermediate between air and water, as the ancient commentators of Aristotle sup- 
posed it to be. Aristotle says (De Coelo, III. 5), that all those who assume such a substance, 
represent things as having arisen from it by condensation and rarefaction ; but he denies of 
Anaximander that he taught this process of evolution (Phys., I. 4); hence he can not have 
regarded the ἄπειρον of Anaximander as such an intermediate substance, and all the less 
80, if, as shown by the above citation, he supposed it to be only a mixture (uiyua). Who 
they are, that assumed a substance intermediate between air and water, and also who are 
meant by those who, according to Phys., I. 4, assumed one intermediate between fire and 





! 
4 
᾿ 
i 
] 








ia eI λοι. A ning The 


ANAXIMENES, DIOGENES OF APOLLONIA. 37 


air, is unknown; but provably Zeller is right in referring the latter assumption to Jater 
physiologists, whose doctrine had grown out of that of Anaximenes, or perhaps out of that 
of Anaximander and of Empedocles. 


§ 14. Anaximenes of Miletus, younger than Anaximander, and 
perhaps also one of his personal disciples, posits air as the first prin- 
ciple, and represents fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth as produced 


from it by//condensation (πύκνωσις) and? rarefaction (μάνωσις or 
ἀραίωσις). The earth, which is flat and round like a plate, is sup- 
ported by the air. “ As our soul, which is air, holds us together, so 
breath and air encompass the universe.” 

Diogenes of Apollonia, who lived in the fifth century before 
Christ, also sees in air the original essence and immanent ground of 
all things. So also Ideeus of Himera. 


Besides the historians of philosophy, Krische (Forschungen, I. pp. 52-57) treats especially of Anax- 
imenes. 

Schleiermacher, Ueber Diogenes von Apollonia (read in the Berlin Academy of Sciences, January 
29, 1811), in the Abd. der ph. Cl., Berl. 1814; reprinted in Schleiermacher’s Werke, Abth. III. vol. 2, Berlin, 
1838, pp. 149-170. F. Panzerbiecter, De Diogenis A. Vita et Scriptis, Meiningen, 1823; Diogenes Apol- 
loniates, Leipsic, 1830, Cf. Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 163-177. 


The birth of Anaximenes is placed by Apollodorus (Diog. Laért., II. 2) in the 63d 
Olympiad (528-524 B. c.). Yet perhaps here the time of his birth has been confounded 
with the time when he flourished or with the year of his death. According to Suidas, he 
was living in the 55th Olympiad, in the time of Cyrus and Creesus. Diog. L. terms him 
(ibid.) a pupil of Anaximander. The dialect of his work was (according to the same locus) 
the pure Ionic. 

Aristotle testifies (Metaph., 1.3): “ Anaximenes and Diogenes hold the air to be prior to 
water, and place it before all other simple bodies as their first principle.” But this air, 
without detriment to its materiality, Anaximenes conceived, conformably to his hylozoistie 
stand-point, as animated. From the work composed by Anaximenes the following sentence 
is preserved (by Stobzeus, Hcl. Phys., p. 296): οἷον ἡ ψυχὴ ἡ ἡμετέρα ἀὴρ οὖσα συγκρατεῖ 
ἡμᾶς, καὶ ὅλον τὸν κόσμον πνεῦμα καὶ ἀὴρ περιέχει. It is not probable that Anaximenes 
discriminated fire from this animated air as something different and finer. On the contrary, 
he appears to have identified fire with the finest air, as was universally customary before 
Empedocles, as Heraclitus, in particular, explicitly conceives their relation, and as Diogenes 
of Apollonia, who followed Anaximenes in his speculation, did; then πύκνωσις, or conden- 
sation, was the first, and ἀραίωσις, rarefaction, the second process which it underwent 
Anaximenes, according to the unanimous testimony of post-Aristotelian authorities, con- 
ceived this air as injinite in extent, so that we must include him among those referred to 
in Arist., Phys., III. 4 (ὥσπερ φασὶν οἱ φυσιολόγοι, τὸ ἔξω σῶμα τοῦ κόσμου͵ οὗ ἡ οὐσία 1 
ἀὴρ ἢ ἄλλο τι τοιοῦτον, ἄπειρον εἶναι). Anaximenes taught that all things arose from air 
through condensation and rarefaction, which mode of origin he seems, according to Theo- 
phrastus (in Simplic., Ad Arist. Phys., fol. 32), to have been the first to suggest; when 
Aristotle (Phys., I. 4; De Coelo, III. 5) ascribes it also to those physiologists who assume, 
as a first principle, water or fire, or something between fire and air, or between water and 
air, it is probable that, beside Heraclitus, he has especially in view later philosophers; ne 


38 HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS. 


work by Thales was accessible to him, and it is hardly possible that any thing was known 
to him from any other source of such a doctrine as having been held by Thales. Anax- 
imenes is in advance of his predecessors, partly in his doctrine of condensation and rare- 
faction, and partly because he chose for his principle, not a substance still imperfect and 
undeveloped, but that one which, as being the finest, might most naturally pass for the 
highest,—in which direction Heraclitus, in naming that substance fire, went still another 
step further. 

We know nothing of Ideus of Himera, except from a passage of Sext. Empir. (Adv. 
Math., 1X. 360), in which he is associated with Anaximenes and Diogenes. 

Of the work of Diogenes of Apollonia (in Crete,—a contemporary of Anaxagoras, 
Diog. L., IX. 57) there exist a number of fragments, which Panzerbieter has collected 
together. The doctrine of Diogenes is apparently to be understood as an attempt to 
defend the stand-point of hylozoism in opposition to the dualism of Anaxagoras, and at the 
same time to render the doctrine of hylozoism more perfect in itself. When Diogenes 
declares air to be the finest of substances, and yet represents other substances as arising 
from it by condensation and rarefaction, it is obvious that this can not mean that the 
original air is rarefied, but only that the formative process in general depends on conden- 
sation and rarefaction, so that the former must have preceded the latter, just as, with 
Heraclitus, the ‘downward way” (ὁδὸς κάτω) goes before the “upward way” (ὁδὸς ἄνω). 
The proof of the unity of substance, Diogenes finds in the fact of the assimilation of the 
substances of the earth by plants, and of the vegetable substances by animals (Simplic., 
Ad Arist. Phys., fol. 32). 


§ 15. Heraclitus of Ephesus was probably younger than Pythagoras 
and Xenophanes, whom he names and combats, but older than Par- 
menides, who on his part makes reference to Heraclitus, and seems to 
have arrived at his own metaphysical principle while arguing against 
him. Through his doctrine of fire as the fundamental form of existence 
and his doctrine of the constant flux of all things, Heraclitus gives the 
most direct expression to the notion involved in the Ionic philosophy 
generally, the notion of a constant process of the original, animated 
substance. Heraclitus assumes, as the substantial principle of things, 
ethereal fire, which he at once identifies with the divine Spirit, who 
knows and directs all things. The process of things is twofold, 
involving the transformation of all things into fire and then of 
fire into all other things. The latter movement is styled the “way 
downward,” which leads from fire (identical with the finest air) to 
water, earth, and so to death; the former movement is the “ way 
upward” from earth and water to fire and life. Both movements 
are everywhere intertwined with each other. All is identical and 
not identical. We step down a second time into the same stream 
and yet not into the same. All things flow. Finite things arise 
through strife and enmity out of the divine original fire, to which, on 
the contrary, harmony and peace lead back. Thus the Deity builds 








HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS. 39 


the world innumerable times in sport, and causes it at the determined 
period to disappear again in fire, that he may build it anew. 

Cratylus, the disciple of Heraclitus, and Plato’s teacher at Athens, 
carried the views of Heraclitus concerning the flux of all things to 
the extreme. 


The work of Heraclitus, on which numerous commentaries were written by the Stoics, and which was 
also, in the second and third centuries after Christ, much read by Christians, until it became suspected by 
the latter on account of its apparently favoring the Noétian heresy, is now extant only in fragments. The 
“ Letters of Heraclitus” are spurious. 

Heracliti Epistolae quae feruntur, ed. Ant. Westermann, Leipsic, 1857 (“ University Programme”). 

Schleiermacher, Herakleitos, der Dunkle von Ephesos, dargestellt aus den Triimmern seines Werkes, 
und den Zeugnissen der Alten, in Wolf and Buttmann’s Musewm der Alterthumswissenschaft, Vol. L, 
1807, pp. 813-533, and in Schleierm., Sémmt. Werke, Abth. 111.. Vol. 2, Berlin, 1838, pp. 1-146. Cf Th. L. 


Eichhoff, Diss, Her., Mayence, 1824. 
Jak. Bernays, Heraclitea, Bonn, 1848. eraklitishe Studien, in the Rhein. Mus., new series, VII. 
pp. 90-116, 1850; Neue Bruchstiicke des Heraklit, ibd, 1X. pp, 241-269, 1854; Die Heraklitischen Briefe, 


Berlin, 1869. 
Ferd. Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos’ des Dunkeln von Ephesos, 2 vols., Berlin, 1858, (The 


most thorough monograph on the subject, but the author is at times too much given to Hegelianizing, 
Lassalle follows Hegel in styling the doctrine of Heraclitus “the philosophy of the logical law of the 
identity of contradictories.” Cf., in reference to Lassalle’s work, Raffaele Mariano, ZLassalle e il suo 
Eraclito Saggio di jilosofia egheliana, Florence, 1865.) 

A. Gladisch, Herakleitos und Zoroaster, Leipsic, 1859; cf. his essays “ tiber Ausspriiche des Heraki.,” 
in the Zeitschrift fiir Alter thumswissenschaft, 1846, No. 121 sq. and 1847, 26sq. Rettig, Ueber einen Aus- 
spruch Heraklits bet Plat. Conviv, 181, Ind. lect., Berne, 1865. 


Heraclitus was a descendant of a noble Ephesian family. The rights of a βασιλεύς 
(king of sacrifices), which were hereditary in the family of Androclus, the founder of 
Ephesus and descendant of Codrus, he is reported to have resigned in favor of his younger 
brother. By the banishment of his friend Hermodorus, his aristocratic feeling was inten- 
sified into the bitterest hatred of the Demos. (On Hermodorus, οἵ. Zeller, De Hermodoro 
Ephesio et de Hermodoro Platonis discipulo, Marb. 1859.) Heraclitus also expressed himself 
sharply respecting thinkers and poets whose opinions differed from his own, so far as he 
found them distinguished rather for multifarious knowledge than for rational discernment 
and ability to comprehend the all-directing reason. Thus he says (ap. Diog. L., IX. 1): 
πολυμαθίη νόον ov διδάσκει (or φύει ? as we read in Procl., Jn Plat. Tim., p. 31). ‘Hoiodov yap 
ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ ἸΤυθαγόρην, αὖθίς te Ξενοφάνεά te καὶ Ἑκαταῖον. His blame extended even to 
Homer: ‘‘‘ Homer,’ he said, ‘ought to have been driven from the lists and flogged, and 
Archilochus likewise.’” It is, nevertheless, quite possible that those whom he censures 
exercised an essential influence on his opinions; at least, Heraclitus agreed with Xe- 
nophanes in the hypothesis that the stars were a¢rial phenomena, constantly being repro- 
duced, and we might (as Susemihl remarks) suppose the Heraclitean doctrine of the world 
and of the fire-spirit related to the doctrine of Xenophanes, distinguishing the world, as 
something manifold and changeable, from the one immutable God: still the theological 
doctrines of these philosophers are very unlike, and their points of contact in natural 
philosophy are few. The surname of Heraclitus, ὁ σκοτεινός, ‘the Obscure,” is found first 
in the Pseudo- Aristotelian treatise De Mundo (c. 5). Yet we find already in the third book 
of the Aristotelian Rhetoric (c. 5) an intimation that the syntactical relation of words in 
Heraclitus was not always easy to determine, and Timon, the Sillograph (about 240 B. c.), 
terms him “a riddler” (αἰνικτὴς). Socrates is reported to have said, that it needed a 
Delian (excellent) diver to sound the meaning of his work. Heraclitus flourished, accord- 


40 HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS. 


ing to Diog. L., IX. 1 (Diog. probably follows Apollodorus), in the 69th Olympiad (502-506 
F. C.), or, according to another account (given by Eusebius, Chron., ad Ol. 80.2 and 81.2), 
in Olymp. 80 or 81; with this latter account agrees, far better than with the former, the 
apparently trustworthy report (ap. Strabo, XIV. 1, 25; cf. Plin., Hist. Natur., XXXIV. 
5, 21), that Hermodorus of Ephesus, the friend of Heraclitus, assisted the Roman Decem- 
virs in their legislation (about Olymp. 82.1). Epicharmus (whose life falls between 556 and 
460 8. C., according to Leop. Schmidt, Quaest. Epicharm., Bonn, 1846) notices his doctrine. 
That Parmenides combats his ideas, and in doing so alludes clearly to specific propositions 
and words of Heraclitus (in particular, to his doctrine of the coincidence of contraries and 
of the ebbing and flowing harmony of the world, which Heraclitus compares to the form 
and motion of the bow and the lyre) has been shown by Steinhart (Allg. Litt. Ztg., Halle, 
1845, p. 8928q., Plat. Werke, III., p. 394) and Jak. Bernays (Rhein. Museum, VIL, p. 114 54ᾳ.), 
though Zeller (Ph. d. Gr., I., 2d ed., p. 495, 3d ed., p. 548 84.) disputes this. 

In view of these historical circumstances, the supposition is shown to be improbable, 
which has been held by some modern investigators, that the doctrine of Heraclitus origi- 
nated in the endeavor to unite the members of the antithesis: being and non-being, which 
had been sharply distinguished and separated by the Eleatics (first by Parmenides). It 
can not be said with truth that the primary conception and the starting-point in the 
philosophy of Heraclitus was the abstract notion of becoming, as the unity of being and 
non-being, and that this notion was then only embodied in the concreter form of a physical 
conception or dogma. Heraclitus is from first to last a hylozoist, fire and soul are for him 
identical, the dry soul is the best, the moistened soul of the drunken is unwise. Having 
been first incited by Anaximenes, he then developed his doctrine independently. It is 
only correct to say that he attaches greater weight to the process of things than his pre- 
decessors had done, as would be natural, considering the nature of the element which he 
regarded as the principle of being. The advance of Parmenides to the conception of 
being, first made it possible to extract the conception of becoming from the Heraclitean 
notion of the flux of things or the transformations of fire. This abstraction is a mental 
achievement which was first accomplished, not by Heraclitus himself, but by Parmenides 
and Plato, in the critique of his opinions. (For this reason Heraclitus, although younger than 
Pythagoras and Xenophanes, must be considered in connection with the earlier Ionic natural 
philosophers, and that as the thinker who gave to the tendency of their school its most 
perfect expression.) Aristotle, in his historical survey of the course of development in 
the earlier Greek philosophy (Metaph., I.38q.), simply places Heraclitus among the earlier 
Tonians, without even noticing the actual diversity in stand-points; for, after speaking of 
the principles of Thales and of Anaximenes and Diogenes, he proceeds: Ἵππασος δὲ πῦρ 
ὁ Μεταποντῖνος καὶ Ἡράκλειτος ὁ 'Egéowoc. The triad: fire (including air), water, earth, 
corresponds with the three ‘‘aggregate states” of matter (as they are now called); 
Empedocles (see below), separating air more distinctly from fire, first arrived at the 
distinction of the four so-called elements. 

Plato (or rather some Platonist) says (Soph., p. 242), after speaking of some of the 
earlier Ionians and of the Eleatics: ᾿Ιάδες δὲ καὶ Σικελικαί τινες ὕστερον povoa. By this 
he must mean either that the Sicilian doctrine, 7. e., the doctrine of Empedocles, was later 
than the Ionic, ὦ. 6., than that of Heraclitus, or (what is less probable) that both were 
later than the Eleatic; but in the latter case he could probably only mean: later than 
Xenophanes’ doctrine of unity. 

The opposition of Heraclitus to the ideas of the masses and of their leaders the poets, 
probably had principal reference (aside from their political differences) to the popular my- 
thology. The multitude know nothing of the one all-controlling divine fire-spirit. (‘Ev τὸ 





WAS me 


a ee ee eee ee ee ee 


ee ὦν 





HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS. 41 


σοφόν: ἐπίστασϑαι γνώμην, ἤτε οἱ ἐγκυβερνήσει [τε οἵη κυβερνᾷ ἀεὶ 7 ἦτε οἰακίζει 3 κραδαίνει 3] 
πάντα διὰ πάντων) Of this γνώμη, this eternal reason, the mass of men are ignorant 
(τοῦ λόγου τοῦδ᾽, ἐόντος dei, ἀξύνετοι ἄνϑρωποι γίγνονται). Out of the primitive substance, 
which Heraclitus (in what is certainly a noticeable coincidence with Parsee conceptions, 
to which Gladisch is right in directing attention) conceives as the purest fire or light, and 
also as the Good, he represents individual objects as coming forth through the influence of 
strife or combat (which Homer, therefore, was wrong in wishing to see brought to an end). 
Thus with him is (Plut., Js. et Os., 48) πόλεμος πατὴρ πάντων͵ ‘strife the father of all 
things ;” the world is the dispersed deity, the ἕν διαφερόμενον αὑτὸ αὑτῷ, but which, like 
the elastic frame of the bow and the lyre, in going apart comes together again (Plat., 
Sympos., 187a; οἵ. Soph., 242 6). The universe is the elemental fire itself, which is now 
extinguished and now kindled again (Clem., Str., V. 599: κόσμον τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων οὗτε τις 
θεῶν οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ᾽ ἣν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον͵ ἁπτόμενον μέτρῳ καὶ 
ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρῳ). The double process of the (relative) materialization of the fire- 
spirit, and the re-spiritualization of earth and water, is constantly going on (πυρὸς 
ἀνταμείβεται πάντα καὶ πῦρ ἁπάντων, ὥσπερ χρυσοῦ χρήματα καὶ γρημάτων χρυσός), water and 
earth are πυρὸς τροπαί, modes of fire; fire passes over into them in the ὁδὸς κάτω, or ‘down- 
ward way,” and they pass over into fire in the ὁδὸς ἄνω, the ‘‘ upward way,” but both 
ways are inseparable: ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω win. The priests of Ormuzd (as Gladisch remarks) 
are actively on the side of the good principle, in the contest waged between good and evil; 
but Heraclitus, as a thinker, is controlled by a theoretical interest, that of discerning the 
ground of their antagonism, and this he finds in the παλιντροπία, the ἐναντία pon (Plat., 
Crat., 413 e, 420 8), the ἐναντιοτροπή (Diog. L., IX. 7), or ἐναντιοδρομία (Stob., Eclog., 1. 60) of 
things, the γίνεσθαι πάντα κατ᾽ ἐναντιότητα, and says: παλίντροτος ἁρμονίη κόσμου, ὅκωσπερ 
λύρης καὶ τόξου (Plut., Js. et Os., 5); ef. Arist., Hih. N. VIIT.2: Ἡράκλειτος τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέ- 
pov καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν Kai πάντα κατ᾽ ἔριν γίγνεσθαι. In other words, 
it is a law of the universe that in every thing contraries are united, as life and death, 
waking and sleeping, youth and old age, and each contrary passes into its opposite. 
Unexpected things await man after death. Sext. Emp., Pyrrh. Hypotyp., 111. 230: ore μέν 
yap ἡμεῖς ζῶμεν͵ τὰς ψυχὰς ἡμῶν τεϑνάναι καὶ ἐν ἡμῖν τεϑάφϑαι: bre δὲ ἡμεῖς ἀποϑνήσκομεν, 
τὰς ψυχὰς ἀναβιοῦν καὶ ζῆν, “while we live, our souls are dead and buried in us; but 
when we die, our souls are restored to life.’ When the power of peace and unity prevails 
in the All, all finite objects resolve themselves into pure fire, which is the Deity; but 
they come forth from it anew through variance. Schleiermacher (whom Ritter, Brandis, 
Bernays, and Zeller contradict in this point, while Lassalle agrees with him) was probably 
wrong in doubting that the doctrine of the periodical dissolution of the world in fire 
(ἐκπύρωσις) was held already by Heraclitus (and borrowed from him by the Stoics); Aristotle 
ascribes it to him (Meteorol., I. 14, De Coelo, I. 10, Phys., III. 5; cf. Metaph., ΧΙ. 10: 
Ἡράκλειτός φησιν ἅπαντα γίγνεσθαί ποτε πῦρ), and it is contained in the more recently dis- 
covered fragment in Hippolytus, IX. 10: πάντα τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται. 

In view of the dictum of Heraclitus, “all things flow,” Plato (Theaet., 18la; ef. Crat., 
Ῥ. 4024: ὅτι πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει) terms the Heracliteans playfully τοὺς ῥέοντας, 
κῃ flowing,” at the same time having in view and censuring their inconstant character, 
which rendered all serious philosophical discussion with them impossible. Cratylus, a 
teacher of Plato, went beyond Heraclitus, who had said that no one could step down 
twice into the same stream, by asserting that this was not possible even once (Arist., Metaph., 
IV. 5),—an extreme, as the last logical consequence of which, Aristotle reports that 
Cratylus thought he ought to say nothing more, but simply moved his finger. 

The changeable, which, for Heraclitus, is synonymous with the sum of all real things, 


42 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS. 


is reduced by Parmenides to sensuous appearance, and by Plato to the complex of indi- 
vidual objects subject to genesis and perceptible by the senses. But for the very reason 
that Heraclitus assumes no second province of reality, his cosmos is not identical with 
the mere world of the senses of later thinkers. Heraclitus does not distinguish from his 
cosmos the divine and eternal, as something separable from it. The λόγος or the eternal, 
all-embracing order (γνώμη, δίκη, εἱμαρμένη, TO περιέχον ἡμᾶς λογικόν τε bv καὶ φρενῆρες, ὁ 
Ζεύς) is, according to him, immanent, as the ξυνόν (κοινόν), or universal principle, in change 
itself, and he calls upon each individual to follow in his thought and action this universal 
reason (Heracl., ap. Sext. Emp., VII. 133: διὸ det ἔπεσϑαι τῷ ξυνῷ: τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἔόντος 
Evvev ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν. Ap. Stob., Serm., III. 84: ξυνόν ἐστι 
πᾶσι τὸ φρονεῖν" ξὺν νόῳ λέγοντας ἰσχυρίζεσϑαι χρὴ τῷ ξυνῷ πάντων͵ ὅκωσπερ νόμῳ πόλις 
καὶ πολὺ ἰσχυροτέρως: τρέφονται γὰρ πάντες οἱ ἀνϑρώπινοι νόμοι ὑπὸ ἑνὸς τοῦ ϑείου, κρατεῖ 
γάρ τοσοῦτον ὁκόσον ἐϑέλει καὶ ἐξαρκεῖ πᾶσι καὶ περιγίνεται). This is the same law with 
that which keeps the heavenly bodies in their courses; the sun, says Heraclitus, will not 
overstep its bounds, for, if it did, the Erinnyes, handmaids of δίκη, would find it again (ap. 
Plut., De Exilio, 11). Without knowledge of the universal reason, the senses are untrust- 
worthy witnesses. Mere abundance of knowledge profits nothing (Heracl., ap. Seat. Emp., 
VII. 126: κακοὶ μάρτυρες ἀνϑρώποισιν ὀφϑαλμοὶ καὶ ὦτα βορβόρου ψυχὰς ἔχοντος [according 
to Bernays’ conjecture, in place of the reading of the MSS.: βαρβάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων] : 
ap. Diog. L., IX. 1: πολυμαϑίη νόον ov διδάσκει; ap. Procl., in Tim., p. 31: πολυμαϑίη νόον 
ov φύει). The rule for practical conduct is also contained in the law common to all, 
proximately in the law of the state, absolutely in the law of nature (Heracl., ap. Clem. 
Alex., Strom., IV. 418 Ὁ: δίκης ὄνομα οὐκ ἂν ἤδεσαν, εἰ ταῦτα μὴ ἦν. Ap. Diog. L., IX. 2: 
μάχεσϑαι χρὴ τὸν δῆμον ὑπὲρ νόμου ὅκως ὑπὲρ τείχους. Lbid.: ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύειν μᾶλλον 
ἢ πυρκαΐην. Ap. Stobaeus, Serm., 111. 84: σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ μεγίστη, καὶ σοφίη ἀληϑέα λέγειν 
καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν éTatovTac). 

The doctrine of Heraclitus may be termed monistic, inasmuch as it represents the 
eternal reason as immanent in the world of individuality and change; and hylozoistic, inas- 
much as it conceives all matter to be animated. Plato ascribes to the ideal an independent 
existence, separate from the sensible. Aristotle combats this Platonic χωρισμὸς and affirms 
the immanence of the universal in the individual, of the ideal in the sensible; yet he too 
recognizes for mind (νοῦς) an existence apart from all matter. The Stoics, in their philoso- 
phy of nature and in their theology, reproduced the doctrine of Heraclitus,—in which also 
their ethics, notwithstanding its essentially Socratic and Cynic origin, found various points 
of union. 


§ 16. Pythagoras of Samos, the son of Mnesarchus, was born 
about Ol. 49.3 = 582 B.c. According to some accounts he was a 
pupil of Pherecydes and Anaximander and acquainted with the 
doctrines of the Egyptian priests. At Crotona, in Lower Italy, 
where he settled in Ol. 62.4 = 529 8. c., he founded a society, whose 
aims and character were at once political, philosophical, and religious. 
All that can be traced back with certainty to Pythagoras himself is 
the doctrine of metempsychosis and the institution of certain religious 
_and ethical regulations, and perhaps also the commencement of that 
mathematico-theological form of speculation, which was subsequently 
carried to a high degree of development. 








ἕω 


scant aria 


wt tye AA oe hs Ae 


τ δα AE SA I EIEN cM) te 


a Gt Ta ea age 


li ae Sas 


ee ce 


ee 2 eae 


re 


PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS. 43 


Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates, passes for the first Pytha- 
gorean who made public (in a written work) the philosophical system 
of the school. Of this work considerable fragments are still extant ; 
yet it is very doubtful whether the work is genuine or a counterfeit, 
dating at the latest from the last century before Christ, and only pos- 
sessing a certain importance as an authority in regard to ancient 
Pythagoreanism, from its having been partially founded on earlier 
authorities. 

Of the earlier Pythagoreans, the most celebrated, beside Philo- 
laus, were his disciples Simmias and Cebes (who, according to Plato’s 
Phaedo, were friends of Socrates), Ocellus the Lucanian, Timzeus of 
Locri, Echecrates and Acrio, Archytas of Tarentum, Lysis, and 
Eurytus. Alemzon of Crotona (a younger contemporary of Pythag- 
oras), who held with the Pythagoreans the doctrine of contraries, 
Hippasus of Metapontum, who saw in fire the material principle of 
the world, Ecphantus, who combined the doctrine of atoms with the 
doctrine of a world-ordering spirit, and taught the revolution of the 
earth on its axis, Hippodamus of Miletus, an architect and politician, 
and others, are named as philosophers, whose doctrines were related 
to those of Pythagoreanism. The comic poet Epicharmus, who occa- 
sionally alludes to disputed questions in philosophy, appears to have 
come under the influence of various philosophies, and among them, 
in particular, of Pythagoreanism. 


The reputed writings of Pythagoras are spurious (Carmen Aureum, ed. K. E. Ginther, Breslau, 1816; 
Th. Gaisford, in Poetae Minores Graeci, Oxford, 1814-20, Leipsic, 1823; Schneeberger, Die goldenen 
Spriiche des Pythagoras—German translation, with introduction and annotations—Minnerstadt, 1862). So 
also are the works ascribed to Ocellus Lucanus (De Rerum Natura, ed. A. F. Guil. Rudolph, Leips. 1801; 
ed. Mullach, in Aristot. de Melisso, etc., Berlin, 1845) and Timzus Locrus (who is credited with a work περὶ 
ψυχᾶς κόσμω, which is only an abstract of Plato’s Timaeus, of late origin, ed. J. J. de Gelder, Leyden, 
1336; ef. G. Anton, De Origine Lib. inser. περὶ ψυχᾶς κόσμω καὶ φύσεως, Berlin, 1852), and, most probably, 
also all the philosophical fragments of Archytas of Tarentum (Fragm., ed. Conr. Orelli, in the 2d vol. of the 
Opuscula Graecorum veterum Sententiosa et Moralia, Leipsic, 1829; ef. Petersen, Wistor.-Phil. Studien 
Hamburg, 1832, p. 24; (ἃ. Hartenstein, De Archytae Tarentini Fragmentis Philosophicis, Leipsic, 1833 ; 
Petersen, in the Zeitschr. fiir Alterthumswiss, 1836, p. 873; O. F. Gruppe, Ueber die Fragmente des Archy- 
tas und der diteren Pythagoreer, Berlin, 1840; F. Beckmann, De Pythagoreorum Reliquiis, Berlin, 1844 
and 50; Quaestiones Pythagor., L-IV., Braunsberg (Lections-Katal.), 1852,.55, °59, 68). The authenticity 
of the work of Philolaus, formerly sometimes questioned, but after Boeckh’s collection of the fragments 
almost universally conceded, has been anew disputed, as to parts of the work, by Zeller and others, and 
wholly rejected by Val. Rose. Still more recently Schaarschmidt has undertaken to demonstrate the 
Spuriousness of the work ; yet ef., per contra, Zeller in the third ed. of Part I. of his Philos. der Griechen, 
p. 243 seq. The most complete collection of Pythagorean fragments is furnished by Mullach, in Vol. IL. 
of his Fragm. Philos. Gr., 1867, 1-129. 

Jamblichus, De Vita Pythogorica liber ; acced. Malchus sive Porphyrius, de vita Pythagorae, ed. 
Kiessling, Leips. 1815-16; ed. Westermann, Paris, 1850. [English transl. of Jamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras. 
by Taylor, Lond. 1818. “ The Life of Pythagoras with his Golden Verses, together with the Life of 
Hicrocles and his Commentaries upon the Verses” (Engl. transl. from the French of Dacier, with the 
exception of the Golden Verses, which are translated from the Greek) by N. Rowe, Lond. 1707.—7r.] 


44 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS. 


Of the more modern writers on Pythagoreanism in general and on individual Pythagoreans, may be 
mentioned: Chr. Meiners, in his Gesch. der Kiinste und Wiss. in Gr, το. Rom, Vol. 1, p. 118 8q.; Aug. 
Boeckh, Disp. de Platonico systemate coelestium globorum et de vera indole astronomiae Philolaicaue, 
Heidelb. 1810, also with additions and supplement in his AZ. Schr., III., Leips. 1866, pp. 266-342; Philolaus 
des Pythagoreers Lehren nebst den Bruchstiicken seines Werkes, Berlin, 1819; J. A. Terpstra, De Sodalitii 
Pythag. Origine, Conditione, et Consilio, Utrecht, 1824; Heinrich Ritter, Gesch. der Pythagoreischen 
Philosophie, Hamburg, 1826; Ernst Reinhold, Beitrag zur Erlduterung der Pythagoreischen Metaphysik, 
Jena, 1827; Amadeus Wendt, De rerum principiis secundum Pythagoreos, Leips. 1827 ; Christ. Aug. Brandis, 
Ueber die Zahlenlehre der Pythagoreer und Platoniker, in the Rhein. Mus., 1828, p. 208 sq. and 558 8q.; Aug. 
Bernh. Krische, De societatis a Pythagora in urbe Crotoniatarum conditae scopo politico commentatio, 
Gottingen, 1830, cf. Krische’s Forschungen, I. pp. 185-85; M. A. Unna, De Alemaeone Crotoniata, in Chr. 
Petersen’s Philol.-hist. Studien, Hamburg, 1832, pp. 41-87; A. Gladisch, Die Pythagoreer und die Schinesen, 
Posen, 1841; F. H. Th, Allihn, De idea justi qualis fuerit apud Homerum et Hesiodum et quomodo a 
Doriensibus veteribus et a Pythagora exculta sit, Halle, 1847; G. Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IV. 
(London), pp. 525-551; Val. Rose, Comm de Arist. libr. ord. et auctor., Berlin, 1854, p. 2 (where the 
genuineness of the Philolaus fragments is denied); C. L. Heyder, Zthices Pythagoreae vindiciae, Frank fort- 
on-the-M. 1854; F. D. Gerlach, Zaleukos, Charondas, Pythagoras, Basel, 1858; L. Noack, Pythag. und die 
Anfinge abendl. Wiss., in the “ Psyche,” Vol. I1I., 1860, No. 1; Monrad, Ueber die Pyth. Phitlos., in “ Der 
Gedanke” (ed. by Michelet), Vol. III., 1862, No. 8; Vermehren, Die Pythag. Zahlen (G.-Pr.), Giistrow, 
1863; A. Laugel, Pythagore, sa doctrine et son histoire @aprés la critique allemande, in Revue des 
Deux Mondes, XXXIV. année, Par. 1864, pp. 969-929; C. Schaarschmidt, Die angebliche Schriftstelleret 
des Philolaus und die Bruchstiicke der ihm zugeschriebenen Bicher, Bonn, 1864; Ed. Zeller, Pythagoras 
und die Pythagorassage, in his Vortr. u. Abh., Leips. 1865, pp. 30-50; Georg Rathgeber, Grossgriec’ en- 
land und Pythagoras, Gotha, 1866; Adolf Rothenbiicher, Das System der Pythagoreer nach den Angaben 
des Arist. Berlin, 1867; Mullach, De Pythagora ejusque discipulis et successoribus, in the Fragm, 
Philos. Gr., U1. 1867, pp. L-LVII.; Eduard Baltzer, Pyth. der Weise von Samos, Nordhausen, 1868 (adopts 
the theory of R6th); Albert Freiherr von Thimus, Die harmonikale Symbolik des Alterthums, part I., 
Cologne, 1868; F. Latendorf, Seb. Franci de Pyth. ejusque symbolis disputatio comm. ill., Berlin, 1868. 
Cf. also L. Prowe, Ueber die Abhdngigkeit des Copernicus von den Gedanken griechischer Philosophen 
und Astronomen, Thorn, 1865, and the works by Ideler, Boeckh, and others, cited below (p. 47). 

On Alemzeon the Crotoniate, see Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 68-78. 

On Hippodamus of Miletus: C. Ἐς Hermann, De Hippod. Milesio, ad Arist, Pol., II. 5,Marburg, 1841 ; 
L. Stein, in Mohl’s Zeitschr fiir Staatswissenschaft, 1853, 161 sq.; Rob, v. Mohl, Gesch. und Litt. der 
Staatswiss., Vol. I., Ἐπ]. 1855, p. 171; Karl Hildenbrand, Gesch. κι. System der Rechts- und Staatsphilos., 
Vol. L., 1860, p. 59sq. On Hippodamus and Phaleas: Herm. Henkel, Zur Gesch. der griech. Staatswiss. 
(α. Progr.), Salzwedel, 1866. 

Epicharmi fragmenta. coll. H. Polman Kruseman, Harlem, 1834; rec. Theod. Bergk, Poétae lyrici 
Graec., Leips. (1843, 58) 1866; ed. Mullach, Fragm. Ph. Gr., p. 135 seq.; ef. Grysar, De Doriensium comoedia, 
p. 848q.; Leop. Schmidt, Quaestiones Epicharmeae, spec. I: de Epicharmi ratione philosophandi, 
Bonn, 1846; Jac. Bernays, Zpicharmos und der αὐξανόμενος λόγος. in the Rhein Mus. f. Ph., new series, 
VIII. 1853, p. 280 8q.; Aug. O. Fr. Lorenz, Leben und Schriften des Koérs Ep. nebst einer Fragmenten- 
sammlung, Berlin, 1864 (cf. Leop. Schmidt in the @étt. gel. Anz., 1865, No. 24, pp. 931-958); G. Bernhardy, 
Grundr. der griech. Litt., 2d revised ed,, II. Ὁ, 1859, pp. 458-467. 


“Of Pythagoreanism and its founder tradition has the more to tell us the farther it is 
removed in time from its subject, whereas it becomes more reticent in proportion as we 
approach chronologically nearer to that subject itself” (Zeller). Nevertheless, we possess 
several very old and entirely reliable data concerning Pythagoras. Xenophanes, the 
founder of the Eleatic school, ridicules the doctrine of Pythagoras in the following lines 
(ap. Diog. L., VIII. 36) :— 


Kai ποτέ μιν στυφελιζομένου σκύλακος παριόντα 
Φασὶν ἐποικτεῖραι καὶ τόδε φάσϑαι ἔπος" 
Παῦσαι, μηδὲ ῥάπιζ᾽, ἐπείη φίλου ἀνέρος ἐστὶ 
Ψυχή, τὴν ἔγνων φϑεγξαμένης ἀΐων. 


Heraclitus says (ap. Diog. L., VIII. 6): “ΟΥ̓ all men, Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, 
most practiced inquiry (ἱστορίην ἤσκησεν); his own wisdom was eclectic and nothing better 





ee eS eas by 


en et re 


we 


PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS, 45 


than polymathy and perverted art.” Herodotus (II. 81 and 123) traces the doctrine of 
metempsychosis and certain religious regulations of the (Orphists and) Pythagoreans back 
to the Egyptians, thus implying, apparently, that Pythagoras visited the Egyptians. 
Isocrates (Laud. Busir., 28) is the first who expressly mentions such a visit. Cicero says 
of Pythagoras (De Fin., V. 29, 87): ‘“ Aegyptum lustravit.” For the fact that the mathe- 
matical sciences originated in Egypt and were there cultivated by the priests, we have 
Aristotle’s testimony (Met., I. 1). From that country Pythagoras, according to the evidence 
of Callimachus (ap. Diodorus Siculus, in the Vaticanische Excerpte, VII—X. 35), brought 
much of his mathematical knowledge and transplanted it into Hellas, while other portions 
of it were discovered by himself. Among other things, the discovery of the relation be- 
tween the hypotenuse and the sides of the right-angled triangle is ascribed to him by 
Diogenes Laértius (VIII. 12), on the authority of a mathematician named Apollodorus. 
Diogenes cites in this connection the epigram: 


Ἡνίκα Πυϑαγόρης τὸ περικλεὲς εὕρατο γράμμα 
Κειν᾽, ἐφ᾽ ὅτῳ κλεινὴν ἤγαγε βουϑυσίην. 


Whether Pythagoras really traveled in Egypt is a matter not wholly free from doubt. 
It may, nevertheless, be considered as very probable that he did. Many of the embellish- 
ments added by later writers to their accounts of the life and journeys of Pythagoras, 
are easily recognized as fables. Diogenes Laértius relates (VIII. 3), following, apparently, 
the authority of Aristoxenus, that Pythagoras, hating the tyranny of Polycrates, emigrated 
to Crotona, in Lower Italy. According to Cicero (Rep., 11. 15; ef. Tuscul., I. 16), Pythagoras 
came to Italy in Ol. 62.4 (529 B.c.). He united himself to the aristocratic party in Crotona, 
where, as we are told, the depression caused by a defeat, suffered not long before in a 
contest with the Locrians and Rhegians on the river Sagra, had made the population sus- 
ceptible to moral influences, and he secured that party for his project of an ethical and 
religious reform. By this means the intimacy of the union of the members of the aris- 
tocratic party and their power in the state were very considerably increased. 

The members of the Pythagorean society were subjected to a rigid ethico-religious regi- 
men (the Πυθαγόρειος τρόπος τοῦ βίου, which is mentioned already by Plato, Rep., X. p. 600 b). 
An examination as to fitness preceded admission. Disciples were bound for a long time 
to mute obedience, and unconditional submission to the authority of the doctrine pro- 
pounded to them. Rigorous daily self-examination was required of all; the propagation 
among the people of the doctrines (in particular, probably, the theosophie speculations) 
of the school was prohibited. Further requirements imposed on members were moderation 
in the use of articles of food and simplicity in personal attire. The use of animal food was 
permitted, under certain limitations,—a fact attested by Aristotle and by Aristoxenes (ap. 
Diog. L., VIII. 19 and 20); Heraclides of Pontus incorrectly assumes the contrary; but 
certain Orphists and later Pythagoreans abstained wholly from the use of animal food. 
Aristoxenus (ap. Gellius, IV. 11) disputes the assertion that Pythagoras forbade the use 
of beans for food. According to Herod., II. 81, burial in woolen garments was forbidden 
in the Orphic-Pythagorean mysteries. 

The democratic party (perhaps also, at times, an unfriendly aristocratic fraction) reacted 
against the growing power of the society. It is related of Pythagoras that, after having 
lived in Crotona nearly twenty years, and soon after the victory gained in 510 B. c. by the 
Crotoniates, on the river Traeis, over the Sybarites, who were living under the monarchical 
rule of Telys, he was banished by an opposition party under Cylon, and that he removed 
to Metapontum and soon afterward died there. Pythagoreanism found acceptance among 
the aristocracy of numerous Italian cities, and gave to their party an ideal point of support. 


46 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS. 


But the persecutions were also several times renewed. In Crotona, as it appears, the 
partisans of Pythagoras and the ‘‘Cylonians” were, for a long time after the death of 
Pythagoras, living in opposition as political parties, till at length, about a century later, the 
Pythagoreans were surprised by their opponents while engaged in a deliberation in the 
“house of Milo” (who himself had died long before), and, the house being set on fire 
and surrounded, all perished, with the exception of Archippus and Lysis of Tarentum. 
(According to other accounts, the burning of the house, in which the Pythagoreans were 
assembled, took place on the occasion of the first reaction against the society, in the 
life-time of Pythagoras.) Lysis went to Thebes, and was there (soon after 400 B. 6.) a 
teacher of the youthful Epaminondas. Diog. L. (VIII. 7) ascribes to him the authorship 
of a work commonly ascribed to Pythagoras. This work, according to Mullach’s con- 
jecture (Fragm. Ph. Gr., I. 413), was the “Carmen Aureum,” a poem which, however, 
at least in its present form, is probably of later origin.—Not long after this time all 
the political consequence and power of the Pythagoreans in Italy came to an end. At 
Tarentum the Pythagorean Archytas was still at the head of the state in the time of 
Plato. 

Among the authorities for the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, the indications furnished 
by Aristotle are the most important. Of still greater value for our knowledge of the 
Pythagorean system would be the fragments (collected by Boeckh) of the work of Philo- 
laus, a contemporary of Socrates, in case their authenticity were assured. All other 
pretended philosophical writings and fragments of writings by ancient Pythagoreans, are 
decidedly spurious. The contents of the fragments attributed to Philolaus agree in many 
respects quite well with the testimony of Aristotle, and afford besides a much more concrete 
conception of the Pythagorean system; yet with them is mingled much that is of extra- 
neous and later origin, and which is yet scarcely to be placed to the account of the authors 
in whom the fragments are found. Plato and Aristotle seem to have had no knowledge 
of any other than oral utterances of Philolaus. Only their statements and, in part, those 
of the earliest Aristotelians, but no later ones, are perfectly trustworthy. Timon the Sillo- 
graph (writer of satires, see below, § 60) says (Gell., Noct. Att, IIT. 17) that Plato bought 
for much money a small book, on which he founded his dialogue Zimaeus (containing his 
natural philosophy); but it is very doubtful what work is meant (perhaps a work of 
Archytas). A spurious letter from Plato to Dio contains the commission to buy Pytha- 
gorean books. Neanthes of Cyzicus ascribes the first publication of Pythagorean doctrines 
to Philolaus and Empedocles. Hermippus says that Philolaus wrote a book which Plato 
bought in order to copy from it his Timaeus; Satyrus speaks of three books. The three 
books, of which the fragments above mentioned have come down to us, are (as Schaar- 
schmidt has shown) probably spurious, as also are the alleged writings of other ancient 
Pythagoreans and of Pythagoras himself. 

Charmed by the apodictical nature of that knowledge which we have of the mathe- 
matical order immanent in things, the Pythagoreans exaggerated the power of the math- 
ematical principle in their numerical speculation—a speculation which overstepped the 
limits of exact mathematical science. 

The principles of numbers, limit and the unlimited, were viewed by the Pythagoreans, 
according to Aristotle, not as predicates of another substance, but as themselves the sub- 
stance of things; at the same time things were looked upon as images of these principles 
immanent in them. It does not appear that these two statements are to be referred to 
different fractions of the Pythagoreans; perhaps the mode of speech of some suggested 
the one interpretation, that of others the other. Yet the same persons might in a certain 
sense hold both of these doctrines. It is hardly supposable that any one of the ancient 








aw See 


Ὄρος, ee el ae 


1 lie socb tise 





PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS. 4ἴ 


‘Pythagoreans made use of the exact phraseology employed by Aristotle. Aristotle seems. 
rather, at times to be expressing in his own language conceptions which he only foune 
implied in their doctrines. The scale of created objects was symbolized by the series of 
numbers, the numbers four {(τετρακτύς) and ten (δεκάς) playing an especially prominent 
role. 

Of the special doctrines of the Pythagoreans, their astronomical and musical doctrines 
are the most worthy of remark. That the theory of a counter-earth (ἀντίχθων) under the 
earth and the motion of both around a central fire, really belongs to the older Pytha- 
goreans, we know (apart from the at least doubtful Philolaus-Fragments) from Aristotle 
(De Coelo, 11. 13, and Metaph., 1.5). Diog. Laért. says (VIII. 85) that the circular motion of 
the earth was first taught by Philolaus, though others ascribed the doctrine to Hicetas. The 
doctrine of the earth and the counter-earth is ascribed to the Pythagorean Hicetas by 
Pseudo-Plutarch (Plac. Ph., II]. 9); Cicero (Acad., II. 39) attributes to him, on the authority 
of Theophrastus, the doctrine that the earth moves circum axem. The rotation of the 
earth on its axis is also ascribed (Plac., 111. 13; Hippol., Adv. Haer., I. 15) to Ecphantns 
(according to Boeckh’s supposition, a pupil of Hicetas), who assigned to the material atoms 
magnitude, figure, and force, attributing their arrangement to God; also to Plato’s disciple, 
Heraclides of Heraclea on the Euxine, who (according to Stob., Ecl., I. 440) held the world 
to be infinite. That the hypothesis of the sun’s immobility and of the revolution of the 
earth around it agrees with the phenomena was shown later, 281 B. c., by Aristarchus of 
Samos, the astronomer; finally, Seleucus of Seleucia on the Tigris, in Babylonia (about 150 
B. C.), taught the infinite extension of the world and propounded the heliocentric system 
as his astronomical doctrine. (See Plut., Plac. Phil., II. 1, 13, 24; HI. 17; Stob., Eelog. Phys., 
1. 26; ef. Lud. Ideler, Ueber das Verhiltniss des Copernicus zum Alterthwm, in Wolf and Butt- 
mann’s Mus. f. d. Alterthumswiss., 11. 1810, pp. 393-454; Boeckh, De Plat. syst., ete., 1810, 
p. 12 (Ki. Schr., 111. p. 273), Philolaos, p. 122, Das Kosm. System des Plato, p.122 sq, and p. 
142; Sophus Ruge, Der Chaldiéer Seleukos, Dresden, 1865.) Yet accusations of heresy were 
not wanting even in antiquity for those who held the doctrine of the earth’s motion. Wit- 
ness Aristarchus of Samos, who was charged with impiety by Cleanthes the Stoic, on 
account of his astronomical opinions. 

The doctrine of the harmony of the spheres (Arist., De Coelo, 11. 9) was grounded on 
the assumption that the celestial spheres were separated from each other by intervals 
corresponding with the relative lengths of strings, arranged to produce harmonious 
tones. 

The soul was, according to the Pythagoreans, a harmony; chained to the body as a 
punishment, it dwelt in it as in a prison (Plat., Phaedo, p. 62 Ὁ). 

According to the statement of Eudemus, the Aristotelian, in his lectures on Physics 
(reported by Simplicius, Ad. Arist. Phys., 173 a), the Pythagoreans taught that in various 
cosmical periods the same persons and events return or are repeated: εἰ δέ τις πιστεύσειε 
τοῖς Πυθαγορείοις ὡς πάλιν τὰ αὐτὰ ἀριθμῷ κἀγὼ μυθολογήσω τὸ paBdiov ἔχων καθημένοις οὕτω, 
καὶ τὰ ἄλλα πάντα ὁμοίως ἔξει. (The same doctrine meets us again with the Stoies, but only 
in combination with the Heraclitean doctrine of ἐκπύρωσις ; see below, § 54.) 

Ethical notions bore among the Pythagoreans a mathematical form, symbols filling the 
place of definitions. Justice was defined by them (according to Arist., Zth. Nic., V. 8; ef. 
Magn. Moral., 1.1; 1. 34) as ἀριθμὸς ἰσάκις ἴσος (square-number), by which it was intended 
to express the correspondence between action and suffering (τὸ ἀντιπεπονθός, 7. ὁ. ἃ τις 
ἐποίησε, ταῦτ᾽ ἀντιπαθεῖν), or, in other words, retribution. 

Some of the Pythagoreans (according to Arist., Met, I. 5) set forth a table of funda- 
mental contraries, headed by that of limit and illimitation. The conceptions included in it 


48 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS. 


are not properly categories, because not absolutely universal, 7.¢., formal ground-concep- 
tions, equally applicable to nature and mind. The table is as follows :— 


Limit. Tllimitation. 
Oda. Even. 

One. Many. 
Right. Left. 

Male. Female. 

At rest. In motion. 
Straight. Bent. 
Light. Darkness. 
Good. Bad. 
Square. Oblong. 


Alemzeon, the Crotoniate, was a physician, who (according to Arist., Metaph., I. 5) ‘ was 
in the flower of his age when Pythagoras was an old man,” and taught that the majority 
of human things were in twos [in contraries] (εἶναι δύο τὰ πολλὰ τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων), yet did 
not fix on a specific number of contraries, but only gave in each case those which hap- 
pened to occur to him. He taught that the soul was located in the brain, whither all 
sensations were conducted through canals from the organs of sensation (Theophr., De 
Sensu, 25; Plut., Plac. Ph., IV. 16, 17), and that the soul, like the stars, was the subject 
of eternal motion (Arist., De An., I. 2). 

Eurytus is mentioned, together with Philolaus, as among the Pythagoreans whom 
Plato met in Italy (Ὁ. L., III. 6). The system of numerical symbolism was further 
developed by Eurytus, whose speculations appear to have been delivered only orally (Ar., 
Met., XIV. 5, 1092 Ὁ, 10). Philolaus and Eurytus are spoken of as residents of Tarentum 
(Diog. L., VIII. 46): Xenophilus, of Chalcis in Thrace, and the Phliasians Phanto, Eche- 
crates, Diocles, and Polymnastus, pupils of Philolaus and Eurytus, and all personally 
known to Aristoxenus the Aristotelian, are said to have been the last of the Pythagoreans. 
Xenophilus is reported to have taught in Athens and to have died at an advanced age. 
The school disappeared (until the rise of Neo-Pythagoreanism), although the Orphic- 
Pythagorean Orgies were continued. 

Hippodamus of Miletus, a contemporary of Socrates, was (according to Arist., Polit., 
II. 8), like Phaleas, the Chalcedonian (Ar., Pol., II. 7), and (according to Diog. L., III. 37 and 
57) Protagoras, the Sophist, a forerunner of Plato in the construction of political theories. 
According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the first private citizen who undertook to say 
any thing respecting the best form of constitution for the state. The territory of the state, 
he taught, should be divided into three portions: a sacred portion for the service 
of the gods, a common domain for the support of the military order, and a third portion 
to be held as private property. The various courts of justice should be subject to one 
court of appeal. Whether, or to what extent, Hippodamus was connected with the 
Pythagorean school, are doubtful questions. Among the later forgeries under the names 
of early Pythagoreans, was one bearing the name of ‘‘ Hippodamus the Pythagorean,” and 
another ascribed to ‘‘ Hippodamus the Thurian,” by which the same person seems to be 
intended. Fragments of these forgeries are preserved in Stobeeus (Florileg., XLIII. 92-94, 
and XCVIII. 71). Phaleas desired that inequality of possessions among citizens should be 
prevented, affirming that it easily led to revolutionary movements; indeed, he is the first 
who expressly demanded that all citizens should have equal possessions (Arist., Pol., 11. 7, 
1266 b, 40). 





THE ELEATICS. 49 


Epicharmus of Cos, son of Elothales (born about 550, died at Syracuse, about 460 zn. c.), 
in the first of his poetical compositions cited by Diog. L. (III. 9-17), represents a mau 
versed in Eleatic, Pythagorean, and especially in Heraclitean philosophy, engaged in conver- 
sation with one who was a stranger to philosophy and a partisan of the religious ideas of 
the ancient poets and the people. In another of the fragments preserved by Diogenes he 
Giseusses the difference between art and the artist, and between goodness and the man who 
is good, in terms which remind us of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. They are ποὺ to be, 
taken, however, altogether in the Platonic sense, which respects the difference between 
the universal and the individual, but rather in the sense of the distinction between 
abstract and concrete. A third fragment concludes from instances of artistic skill in ani- 
mals, that they, too, are possessed of reason. A fourth contains, in its expressions con- 
cerning the diversity of tastes, much to remind one of the verses of the Eleatie philosopher 
Xenophanes, on the diversity of human conceptions of the gods. A philosophical system 
ean not be ascribed to Epicharmus. Plato says (Theaet., Ῥ. 152 8), that the comic poet, 
Epicharmus, embraced, like Homer, that conception of the world to which Heraclitus 
gave the most general philosophical expression (the doctrine, which finds the real in 
what is perceptible and changeable). Classical aphorisms of Epicharmus are: vage καὶ 
μιέμνασ᾽ ἀπιστεῖν, ἄρθρα ταῦτα τῶν φρενῶν, and νοῦς ὁρᾷ καὶ νοῦς ἀκούει, TaAAA κωφὰ καὶ 
τυφλά. The Roman poet Ennius composed a Pythagorizing didactic poem in imitation 
of one attributed to Hpicharmus. Various forgeries under the name of Epicharmus 
were published at an early date. 

The author of the work ascribed to Philolaus sees in the principles of numbers the 
principles of things. These principles are the limiting and illimitation. They converge 
to harmony, which is unity in multiplicity and agreement in heterogeneity. Thus they 
generate in succession, first, unity, then the series of arithmetical or “ monadice ” numbers, 
then the ‘ geometrical numbers,” or ‘‘ magnitudes,” 7. 6., the forms of space: point, line, 
surface, and solid; next, material objects, then life, sensuous consciousness, and the higher 
psychical forces, as love, friendship, mind, and intelligence. Like is known by like, but it is 
by number that things are brought into harmonious relations to the soul. The understand- 
ing, developed by mathematical study, is the organ of knowledge. Musical harmony 
depends on a certain numerical proportion in the lengths of musical strings. The octave, in 
particular, or harmony in the narrower sense, depends on the ratio—1: 2, which includes 
the two ratios of the fourth (3: 4) and the fifth (2:3 or 4: 6). The five regular solids—the 
cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron—are respec- 
tively the fundamental forms of earth, fire, air, water, and the fifth element, which encom- 
passes all the rest. The soul is united by number and harmony with the body, which is its 
organ, and at the same time also its prison. From the Hestia, ὦ ¢., from the central fire, 
around which earth and counter-earth daily revolve, the soul of the world spreads through 
the spheres of the counter-earth, the earth, the moon, the sun, the planets Mercury, Venus, 
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars to “ Olympus,” the last sphere which includes 
all the others. The world is eternal, and ruled by the One, who is akin to it, and has 
Supreme might and excellence. The director and ruler of all things is God; he is one 
and eternal, enduring and immovable, ever like himself, and different from all things 
beside him. He encompasses and guards the universe. 





§ 17. The foundation of the Eleatic doctrine of unity was laid in 
theological form by Xenophanes of Colophon, metaphysically devel- 
oped as a doctrine of being by Parmenides of Elea, dialectically de- 
fended in opposition to the vulgar belief in a plurality of objects 


50 THE ELEATICS. 


and in revolution and change by Zeno of Elea, and finally, with 
some declension in vigor of thought, assimilated more nearly to the 
earlier natural philosophy by Melissus of Samos. 


The following authors treat especially of the Hveatic philosophers and their doctrines: Joh. Gottfr, 
Walther, Hréffnete Hleatische Grdber, 2d ed., Magdeburg and Leipsic, 1724; Geo. Gust Filleborn, Liber de 
Xenophane, Zenone, Gorgia Aristoteli vulgo tributus, passim illustr, commentario, Halle, 1789; Joh. 
Gottl. Buhle, Commentatio de ortu et progressu pantheismi inde a Xenophane primo ejus auctore usque 
ad Spinozum, Gittingen, 1190, Comm. soc. Gott., vol. X., p. 157 seq. ; G. Ludw. Spalding, Vindiciae philoso- 
phorum Megarscorum subjecto commentario in primam partem libelli de Xenophane, Zenone, Gorgia, 
Berlin, 1793; Falleborn, “ragmente aus den Gedichten des Xenophanes und des Parmenides, in the Bei- 
trdge zur Gesch, der Philos,, “ Stiicke” 6 and 7, Jena, 1795; Amad. Peyron, Empedocl. et Parm. frag- 
menta, Leips. 1810; Chr. Aug. Brandis, Comm. Eleut. pars 1. Xenophanis, Parmenides et Melissi doctrina 
epropriis philosophorum reliquiis exposita, Alton. 1813 ; Vict. Cousin, Yénophane, fondateur de Vécole 
εἰ Elée, 3.1 his Nouveaux fragmens philos., Paris, 1828, pp. 9-95; Rosenberg, De ΕἸ. ph. primordiis, Berlin, 
1829; Sim. Karsten, Philosophorum Graecorum veterum operum reliquiae, Amsterdam, 1835 8q., vol. I., 1: 
Xenophanis Colophonit carm. rel., 1.2: Parmenid.; Riaux, Essai sur Parm. d’Elée, Paris, 1840; 
Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 86-116; Theod. Bergk, Commentatio de Arist. libello de Xenophane, Zenone 
et Gorgia, Marburg, 1848; Aug. Gladisch, Die Eleaten und die Indier, Posen, 1844; Frid. Guil. Aug. 
Mullach, Avistotelis de Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgia disputationes, cum Eleaticorum philos. frag- 
mentis, Berlin, 1845, also in Fragm. ph. Gr., 1. p. 101 seq.; E. Reinhold, De genuina Xenophanis disct- 
plina, Jena, 1847; Ueberweg, Ueber den historischen Werth der Schrift de Melisso, Zenone, Gorgia, in the 
Phiiol., ΨΊΤΙ., 1858, pp. 104-112 (where I sought to show that the second part of the work, ὁ. e., chaps. 3 and 
4, does not contain a reliable account respecting Xenophancs, but does so respecting Zeno; now, however, 
only my first, or negative, not the second, positive, thesis, seems to me tenable), also ibid. XX VI. 1868, 
pp. 709-711; E. F. Apelt, Parmenidis et Empedoclis doctrina de mundi structura, Jena, 1856; Conr, 
Vermehreu, Die Autorschaft der dem Aristoteles zugeschriebenen Schrift περὶ Ἐενοφάνους, περὶ Ζήνωνος, 
περὶ Τοργίου͵ Jena, 1862; Franz Kern, Quaestionum Xenophanearwm capita duo (Progr. scholae Por- 
tensis), Naumburg, 1864: Symbolae criticae ad libellum Aristotelicum de Xenophane, etc., Oldenburg, 
1867; Θεοφράστου περὶ Μελίσσου, in the Philologus, XXVI. 1868, pp. 271-289; Theodor Vatke, Parm. 
Veliensis doctrina qualis fuerit (diss, inaug.), Berl. 1864; Heinrich Stein, Fragm. des Parmenides, 
περὶ φύσεως, in the Symb. philologorwm Bonnensium in honorem Frid. Ritschelii coll., Leipsic, 1864-67, 
pp. 763-806 ; Paul Riffer, De ph. Xen. Coloph. parte morali, diss. inaug., Leipsic, 1868; Th. Davidson, 
The Fragments of Parm., in the Journal of Specul. Philos., IV. 1, St. Louis, Jan., 1870. 


That the first part (cap. 1, 2) of the treatise De Xenophane, Zenone, Gorgéa, transmitted to 
us among the writings of Aristotle, treats of Melissus and not of Xenophanes, Buhle has 
already demonstrated in the essay on pantheism above cited. In agreement with him and 
with Spalding—with whom Fiilleborn, who had before been of a different opinion, expresses 
his accord in his above-cited “ Beitriige”—the same is assumed by Brandis and all later 
investigators, since this result is made perfectly manifest by a comparison of the part in 
question with the doctrines of Melissus as known to us from other sources. It is uncer- 
tain to whom the second part (cap. 3, 4) relates, in the intention of the author, whether to 
Xenophanes or to Zeno; yet in no case are the contents of these chapters to be considered 
as historical.* The last part (cap. 5, 6) treats without doubt of Gorgias. Perhaps this 


* The view supported by me in one of my earliest essays (* Ueber den historischen Werth der Schrift 
de Melisso, Zenone, Gorgi,” in Schneidewin’s Philologus, Ψ ΤΙ. 1853, pp. 104-112), that the second part 
of the work (cap. 8, 4) relates to Zeno und contains a true report of his doctrines, I am now compelled to 
abandon, after more thorough comparison and exacter weighing of all the elements of the problem 
(assenting, as I do, substantially to the argumentation of Zeller in the 2d ed. of the first part of his Ph. ἃ. Gr., 
p. 336 sq.). I can only hold fast, therefore, to the negative opinion, that a trustworthy report respecting 
Xenophanes is not to be found in the work. The teachings there developed (that God is eternal, one, 
spherical, neither bounded nor unbounded, neither moved nor unmoved, might, in view of their dialectical 


form, and, in part also, in view of their nature, be more properly ascribed to Zeno than to Xenophanes. ἢ 


Both of these suppositions are, however, opposed, partly by other considerations, partly by the silence 
of Plato and Aristotle; of Xenophanes, Aristotle says directly (Jfe¢., I. 5), that he left the question 


ero =e 





3 
ὲ 
᾿ 
ἢ 








XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON. 51 


section was intended by the author to be the first in a reverted order (see cap. 6, jfin.). The 
accounts respecting Melissus and Gorgias are substantially correct, though not so through- 
out. The whole can not have been composed by Aristotle, nor by Theophrastus, but only 
by some later Aristotelian. 

The fragments preserved from the writings of the Eleatics are not very extensive, but 
they furnish us a fully authentic and, with respect to the fundamental ideas, a sufficiently 
complete view of the Eleatic philosophy. 


§ 18. Xenophanes, of Colophon, in Asia Minor (born 569 8. c.), 
who removed later to Elea, in Lower Italy, combats in his poems the 
anthropomorphitic and anthropopathic representations of God pre- 
sented by Homer and Hesiod, and enounces the doctrine of the one, 
all-controlling God-head. God is all eye, all ear, all intellect; 
untroubled, he moves and directs all things by the power of his 
thought. 


Xenophanes, according to his own statement (ap. Diog. L., IX. 19), began his wander- 
ings through Hellas (as rhapsodist) at the age of twenty-five years, and lived to be more 
than ninety-two years old. If (as may be assumed with some probability from one of his 
fragments given by Athen., Deipnosoph., 11. p. 54) it is true that he left his native country 
soon after the expedition of the Persians under Harpagus against Ionia (544 B.c.), he must 
have been born about 569 B.c. Apollodorus (ap. Clem. Al., Strom., I. 3801 ο) gives Ol. 40 
(620 8. c.) as the time of his birth; more probable is the report (ap. Diog. L., IX. 20) that 
he flourished Ol. 60 (540 8. 6). He outlived Pythagoras, whom he mentions after the 
death of the latter; he is himself named by Heraclitus. In his latter years he lived in 
Elea (‘EAéa, Ὕέλη, Velia), a Phocean colony. Fragments of his poems, though only a few 
fragments of his philosophical poems, are extant. In a fragment of some extent, pre- 
served by Athenzus (XI. p. 462), in which Xenophanes describes a cheerful feast, he 
demands first that the Deity (termed sometimes Θεός, sometimes O¢0/) be praised with pure 
and holy words, and that the banqueters be moderate and discourse of the proofs of 
virtue, and not of the contests of Titans and similar fables of the ancients (πλάσματα 
τῶν mpotépwv); in another fragment (Ath., X. p. 413 seq.) he warns men not to think too 
highly of success in athletic contests, which he deems it wrong to prefer to intellectual 
culture (οὐδὲ δίκαιον, προκρίνειν ῥώμην τῆς ἀγαθῆς σοφίης. 

That the God οἵ Xenophanes is the unity of the world is a supposition that was early 
current. Wedo not find this doctrine expressed in the fragments which have come 


of the ideal or material nature of the unity of God untouched, and said nothing definite concerning his 
limitation or non-limitation, whereas in chaps. 8 and 4 of the treatise De Yen., etc., it is said, on the one 
hand, that the Eleate there in question ascribed to God the spherical form, and on the other that he taught 
(the antinomy) that God is neither bounded nor unbounded. It is scarcely to be doubted that this latter 
statement arose from a misunderstanding either of the report of Aristotle or more probably of a similar 
report by Theophrastus (which Simplic., Jn Phys., fol. 5b, has preserved for us). Whether the (probably 
late) author of the work intends to treat of Xenophanes or of Zeno, remains still a matter of doubt; the 
former supposition is, perhaps, attended with fewer difficulties than the latter. The author may have made 
use of a Pseudo-Xenophanean writing, or perhaps even of an inexact version of the doctrines and arguments 
of Xenophanes, which had been prepared partly on the authority of the misunderstood passage from Theo- 
phrastus, partly from other sources. The misinterpretation was most easily possible at a time when such 
antinomies had already taken the form of philosophical dogmas (cf., for example, Plotinus, Hnnead, V. 10, 
11, who teaches that God is neither bounded nor unbounded). With this problem negative results sre 
reached more easily and with greater certainty than positive ones. 


52 XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON. 


down to us, and it remains questionable whether Xenophanes pronounced himself posi- 
tively in this sense, in speaking of the relation of God to the world, or whether such ἃ 
conception was not rather thought to be implied in his teachings by other thinkers, who 
then expressed it in the phraseology given above. In the (Platonic?) dialogue, Sophistes 
(p. 242), the leading interlocutor, a visitor from Elea, says: “The Eleatic race among us, 
from Xenophanes’ and even from still earlier times, assume in their philosophical dis- 
courses that what is usually called All, is One” (ὡς ἑνὸς ὄντος τῶν πάντων καλουμένων). The 
‘still earlier” philosophers are probably certain Orphists, who glorified Zeus as the all- 
ruling power, as beginning, middle, and end of all things. Aristotle says, Metaph., I. 5: 
‘‘Xenophanes, the first who professed the doctrine of unity—Parmenides is called his 
disciple—has not expressed himself clearly concerning the nature of the One, so that it is not 
plain whether he has in mind an ideal unity (like Parmenides, his successor) or a material 
one (like Melissus); he seems not to have been at all conscious of this distinction, but, with his 
regard fixed on the whole universe, he says only that God is the One.” Theophrastus 
says (according to Simplic., Ad Arist. Phys., fol. 5b): ὃν τὸ ὃν καὶ πᾶν Ξενοφάνην ὑποτίθεσθαι. 
Timon the Sillograph (Sext. Empir., Hypotyp. Pyrrhon., I. 224) represents Xenophanes as 
saying, that whithersoever he turned his view, all things resolved themselves for him 
into unity. 

The following are all the philosophical fragments which have been preserved from the 
writings of Xenophanes. Ap. Clem. Alex., Strom., V.601c, and Euseb., Praeparat. Evang., 
XII. 13: 

Hic ϑεὸς ἕν te ϑεοῖσι καὶ ἀνϑρώποισι μέγιστος, 
Οὔτε δέμας ϑνητοῖσιν ὁμοίϊος οὗτε νόημα. ' 


Ap. Sextus Empir., Adv. Math., ΤᾺ. 144, ef. Diog. L., TX. 19: 
OdAvE ὁρᾷ, οὗλος δὲ νοεῖ, obAog δὲ τ᾽ ἀκούει. 
Ap. Simplic., Ad Arist. Phys., fol. 6a: 
Αἰεὶ δ᾽ ἐν τωὐτῷ τε μένειν κινούμενον οὐδέν 
Οὐδέ μετέρχεσϑαί μιν ἐπιπρέπει ἄλλοτε (or ἀλλοϑεν) ἀλλη. 
Tbid.: 


᾿Αλλ’ ἀπάνευϑε πόνοιο νόου φρενὶ πάντα Kpadaiver. 


Ap. Clem. Alex., Strom., V. 601 ο, and Euseb., Praepar. Hvang., XIII. 13: 





᾿Αλλὰ βροτοὶ δοκέουσι ϑεοὺς γεννᾶσϑαι (ἔδειν τε 2) 
Τὴν σφετέρην τ᾽ αἴσϑησιν ἔχειν φωνῆν τε δέμας τε. 
᾿Αλλ᾽ εἴτοι γεῖράς γ᾽ εἴχον βόες ἠὲ λέοντες, 

Καὶ γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες, 
Ἵπποι μέν ϑ’ ἵπποίσι, βόες δέ τε βουσὶν ὁμοίας 
Καί κε ϑεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ᾽ ἐποίουν 
Τοιαῦϑ᾽ οἷόν περ καὶ αὐτοὶ δέμας εἶχον ἕκαστοι. 


Cf. Clem. Alex., Strom., VII. p. 111 Ὁ.: ὥς φησιν ὁ Ξενοφάνης" Αἰϑίοπές τε μέλανας σιμοῦς τε, 
Θρακές τε πυῤῥοὺς καὶ γλαυκοὺς (scil. τοὺς ϑεοὺς διαζωγραφοῦσιν), which is also reported 
by Theodoret., Graec. Affect. curat., Serm. III. p. 49, ed. Sylb. Ap. Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., 
IK. 193; 

Πάντα ϑεοῖς ἀνέϑηκαν “Ὅμηρός 9 ‘Hoiodds τε, 

Ὅσσα rap’ ἀνϑρώποισιν ὀνείδεα tai ψόγος ἐστίν, 

Κλέπτειν, μοιχεύειν τε καὶ ἀλλήλους ἀπατεύειν. 





XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON. 53 


Ldid, 1. 289: 
Ὅμηρος δὲ καὶ Ἡσίοδος κατὰ τὸν Κολοφώνιον Ξενοφάνη " 
Oi πλεῖστ᾽ ἐφϑέγξαντο ϑεῶν ἀϑεμίστια ἔργα, 
Ἐλέπτειν͵ μοιχεύειν τε καὶ ἀλλήλους ἀπατεύειν. 


Arist., Rhet., 11. 23, p.1899b, 6: Ξενοφάνης ἔλεγεν ὅτε ὁμοίως ἀσεβοῦσιν οἱ γενέσϑαι 
φάσκοντες τοὺς ϑεοὺς τοῖς ἀποϑανεῖν λέγουσιν" ἀμφοτέρως γὰρ συμβαίνει μὴ εἶναι τοὺς ϑεούς 
ποτε. Ibid. 1400}, 5: Hev. ᾿Ελεάταις ἐρωτῶσιν εἰ ϑίωσι τῇ Λευκοϑέᾳ καὶ ϑρηνῶσιν, ἢ μὴ, 
συνεβούλευεν, εἰ μὲν ϑεὸν ὑπολαμβάνουσι, μὴ ϑρηνεῖν, εἰ δ' ἄνϑρωπον, μὴ ϑύειν. 

[The verse, ἐκ γαίης γὰρ πάντα καὶ εἰς γῆν πάντα τελευτᾷ, cited by Sext. Empir. (Adv. 
Math., X. 313, but on the authority of others: “Ξενοφάνης δὲ κατ᾽ éviovc,”) and by Stobeus 
(Ecl. Phys., 1. p. 294, ed. Heeren) and others, seems to have been erroneously ascribed to 
Xenophanes. Aristotle testifies (Met., I. 8, p. 989a, 5): ‘‘No philosopher has regarded 
earth in the sense in which Thales regarded water, Anaximenes air, and Heraclitus fire, 
as a unique material principle. Meiners (Hist. Doctr. de Vero Deo, p. 327), and after him 
Heeren, Karsten, and others, have held this verse to be a forgery.]—Ap. Sext. Empir., Adv. 
Math., 1X. 361; X. 313, and others: 


Πάντες yap γαίης τε καὶ ὕδατος ἐκγενόμεσϑα. 
Ap. Stobaeus, Florileg., Χ XIX. 41, ed. Gaisf., and Eclog., I. p. 224: 


Οὔτοι an’ ἀρχῆς πάντα ϑεοὶ ϑνητοῖς παρέδειξαν, 
᾿Αλλὰ γρόνῳ ζητοῦντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. 


Ap. Plutarch., Sympos., IX. p. 746 b: 
Ταῦτα δεδόξασται μὲν ἐοικότα τοῖς ἐτύμοισιν. 
Ap. Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 49 and 110, VIII. 326, and others: 


Kai τὰ μὲν οὖν σαφὲς οὔτις ἀνὴρ ἴδεν οὐδέ τις ἔσται 
Eidéc, ἀμφὶ ϑεῶν τε καὶ ἅσσα λέγω περὶ πάντων" 
Ei γὰρ καὶ τὸ μάλιστα τύχοι τετελεσμένον εἰπών, 
Αὐτὸς ὅμως οὐκ οἷδε" δόκος δ᾽ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τέτυκται. 


The most noteworthy of the physical theorems of Xenophanes, after his fundamental 
doctrine, that earth and water are the elements of all created things, is the opinion, com- 
bated by Empedocles (in the verses cited by Arist., De Coelo, II. 12, p. 204a, 25: eizep 
ἀπείρονα γῆς te βάθη Kai δαψιλὸς αἰθήρ, ὡς διὰ πολλῶν δὴ γλώσσης ῥηθέντα ματαίως ἐκκέχυται 
στομάτων ὀλίγον τοῦ παντὸς ἰδόντων), that the earth extends without limit downward, and 
the air upward; the verses in which this view is expressed are communicated by Achilles 
Tatius in his Jsagoge ad Aratum (ap. Petav., Doctr. Temp., III. 76): 


Γαίης μὲν τόδε πεῖρας ἄνω παρὰ ποσσὶν ὁρᾶται 
Αἰθέρε προσπλάζον τὰ κάτω δ᾽ ἐς ἄπειρον ἱκάνει. 


With this doctrine the assertion, sometimes attributed to Xenophanes (but perhaps only 
through the false transference to him of a Parmenidean theorem), that the Deity is spherical, 
does not agree. Xenophanes held the stars (according to Stob., Eel., I. 522) to be fiery clouds: 
the rainbow also was termed by him a νέφος. Xenophanes (according to Origen, Piiloso- 
phwmena, or rather Hippolytus, Adv. Haereticos, I. 14) explained the fact that sea-animals 
were found petrified in the mines of Syracuse, in the marble quarries on the island of 
Paros, and in many other places both inland and on mountains, by the hypothesis, that 


δ4 PARMENIDES OF ELFA. 


the sea had once covered the land; and this hypothesis was immediately enlarged by him 
into the theory of a periodical, alternate mixing and separation of earth and water. 
Xeniades of Corinth is incorrectly named (by Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., VIII. 53, et al.) as a 
disciple of Xenophanes. 


§ 19. Parmenides of Elea, born about 515-510 B. c. (so that his 
youth falls in the time of the old age of Xenophanes), is the most 
important of the Eleatic philosophers. He founds the doctrine of unity 
on the conception of being. He teaches ψ Only being is, non-being is 
not; there is no becoming. That which truly is exists in the form of 
a single and eternal sphere, whose space it fills continuously. Plu- 
rality and change are an empty semblance. The existent alone ig 
thinkable, and only the thinkable is real. Of _the one true existence, 
convincing knowledge is attainable by thought; but the deceptions 
of the senses seduce men into mere opinion and into the deceitful, 
rhetorical display of discourse respecting the things, which are sup- 
posed to be manifold and changing.—In his (hypothetical) explanation 
of the world of appearance, Parmenides sets out from two opposed 
principles, which bear to each other, within the sphere of appearance, 
a relation similar to that which exists between being and non-being. 
These principles are light and night, with which the antithesis of fire 
and earth corresponds. 


That Parmenides received through Xenophanes the philosophical impulses which gave 
direction to his own thinking, we must suppose, even setting aside later evidence, from 
the following language of the (Platonic?) dialogue Sophistes (p. 242): ‘the Eleatic race 
of philosophers dating from the time of Xenophanes (and even earlier). Aristotle says 
(Metaph., I. 5): ‘‘ Parmenides is said (λέγεται) to have been his (Xenophanes’) pupil” Here 
λέγεται is, perhaps, not to be taken as signifying an uncertainty on the part of Aristotle 
with respect to the personal relation of the two philosophers, but as pointing to the half- 
truth of the term ‘‘pupil” (μαθητής), since Parmenides may have been incited to his 
inquiries more by the writings of Xenophanes than by his oral instruction, and since he 
does not stand merely in the relation of a scholar to his predecessor, having himself first 
created the metaphysical principles of Kleaticism. Theophrastus expresses the relation 
in which Parmenides stood to Xenophanes by the use of the term ἐπεγενόμενος (in a 
passage in the first book of his Physics, as cited by Alexander Aphrodis,, Schol. in Arist., 
ed. Brandis, p. 536a, 10: τούτῳ δὲ ἐπιγενόμενος Παρμενίδης Πύρητος ὁ Ἐλεάτης). Plato, 
Theaet., p. 1806 (cf. Soph., p. 211 0) represents Socrates as saying that, while still very 
young, he met Parmenides, who was already advanced in years (πάνυ νέος πάνυ πρεσβύτ), 
as the latter was expounding his philosophical doctrines. From this story the scenery in 
the (probably spurious) dialogue Parmenides is derived, while more specific statements are 
added as to the ages of Parmenides (65 years) and his companion Zeno (40 years) at the time 
alluded to by Socrates. Whether a meeting between Socrates and Parmenides really took 
place, or was only imagined by Plato, is doubtful; but the former supposition is by far the 
more probable, since Plato would scarcely have allowed himself the fiction here merely for 
scenic effect; still less would he have done so in the narrative introduced in the Theaetetus. 







eee ee 


Sa Dee A Marist Sa τῶθιυν 91) 


PARMENIDES OF ELEA. 53 


But even if it were only a fiction, Plato would be careful not to offer too great violenca 
in it to chronological possibility. The report of Diog. Laért. (IX. 23), that Parmenides 
“ flourished ” in Ol. 69 (504-500 B. c.), must, therefore, be erroneous; at that time he can 
scarcely have been more than a few years old. The probable reference of Parmenides, 
in his argumentation, to Heraclitus (see above, § 15), of itself implies that the former 
was younger than Heraclitus. Parmenides appears not to have written his ‘‘ work” before 
about 475-470. 

Parmenides is said to have exerted a salutary influence on the legislation and morals 
vf his native city, where he supported the ethico-political doctrine and action of the 
Pythagoreans. (Diog. L. says [IX. 23]: λέγεται δὲ καὶ νόμους θείναι τοῖς πολίταις, ὡς φησι 
Σπεύσιππος ἐν τῷ περὶ φιλοσόφων) For the moral character and the philosophy of Par- 
menides Plato expresses the highest respect. Aristotle places a lower estimate on his 
doctrine and argumentation, but admits that he was the ablest thinker among the 
Eleatics. 

In his Didactic Poem (the fragments of which are found in Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., 
VIL 111; Diog. Laért., [X. 22; Proclus, Comm. to Plato's Timaeus; Simplicius, ad Arist. Phys. 
ete.), Parmenides represents the goddess of wisdom, to whose seat he is drawn by horses 
under the guidance of the virgin daughters of Helios, as opening up to him the double 
insight, not only into convincing truth, but also into the deceptive opinions of mortals {16:5 
δέ σε πάντα πυθέσθαι, ἠμὲν ἀληθείης εὐπειθέος ἀτρεκὲς ἦτορ, ἠδὲ βροτῶν δόξας, ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι 
πίστις ἀληθής). Truth consists in the knowledge that being is, and non-being can not be; 
deception lies in the belief that non-being also is and 1 must be. Parmenides describes ane 
“goddess as “saying (in a fragment “preserved ‘by Proclus in his Comm. on Plato's Timaeus, 
11. p. 105b, ed. Bas.): 


Ἢ μὲν͵, ὅπως ἔστιν τε Kal ὡς οὐκ ἔστι μὴ εἶναι 
Πειθοῦς ἐστι κέλευθος, ἀληθείη γὰρ ὀπηδεῖ. 
Ἢ δ᾽, ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν τε καὶ ὡς χρεών ἐστι μὴ εἶναι, 
Τὴν δή σοι φράζω παναπειθέα ἔμμεν ἀταρπόν" 
Οὗτε γὰρ ἂν γνοίης τό γε μὴ ἐόν (οὐ γὰρ ἐφικτόν) 
Oite φράσαις. 


After this appear to have followed immediately the words (cited by Clem. Alex., Strom., VI. 
p- 627 b, and by Plotinus, Hnead., V. 1, 8): 


τὸ yap αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι, 


Ie.: The predicate being belongs to thought itself; that I think something and that 
this, which I think, zs (in my thought), are identical assertions; non-being—that which is 
not—can not be thought, can, so to speak, not be reached, since every thing, when it is 
thought, exists as thought; no thought can be non-existent or without being, for there is 
nothing to which the predicate being does not belong, or which exists outside of the sphere 
of being.—In this argumentation Parmenides mistakes the distinction between the subjective 
being of thought and an objective realm of being to which thought is directed, by direct- 


ing ing his attention only to the fact that both are subjects of the predicate being. Says 


Parmenides (ap. “Simplie., Ad Phys., fol. 31, in the third line, we write οὐδ᾽ ἦν ὙΠΕΡ τ of 
οὐδὲν, according to Bergk’s conjecture, see Ind. Lect. Hal., 1867-68) : 


(* A metrical translation of all the Parmenidean fragments cited in this section may be read in the 
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, St. Louis, Jan., 1870, Vol. [V., No.1. The doctrine contained in them 
4s fally explained in the text.—7r.] 


A πο τ 
διό i? A. vw Uc a A} nr ( + e My Ἂ γε . a 4 - 7 


56 PARMENIDES OF ELEA. 


Τωὐτὸν δ᾽ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὔνεκέν ἐστι νόημα" 
Οὐ γὰρ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστίν, 
Ἑὑρήσεις τὸ νοεῖν" οὐδ᾽ ἦν γὰρ ἢ ἔστιν ἢ ἔσται 
"Αλλο παρὲκ τοῦ ἐόντος. 


Not the senses, which picture to us plurality and change, conduct to truth, but only 
thought, which recognizes the being of that which is, as necessary, and the existence of 
that which is not, as impossible. Parm., ap. Sect. Empir., VII. 111: 


᾿Αλλὰ ov τῆσδ᾽ ag’ ὁδοῦ διζήσιος Elpye νόημα, 
Μηδέ σ᾽ ἔϑος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσϑω͵ 
Νωμᾶν ἄσκοπον ὄμμα καὶ ἠχήεσσαν ἀκουὴν 

Καὶ γλῶσσαν" κρίναι δὲ λόγῳ πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον 
Ἔξ ἐμέϑεν ῥηϑέντα. 


Much severer still than his condemnation of the naive confidence of the mass of men 
in the illusory reports of the senses, is that with which Parmenides visits a philosophical 
doctrine which, as he assumes, makes of this very illusion (not, indeed, as illusion, in 
which sense Parmenides himself proposes a theory of the sensible, but as supposed truth) 
the basis of a theory that falsifies thought, in that it declares non-being identical with 
being. It is very probable that the Heraclitean doctrine is the one on which Parmenides 
thus animadverts, however indignantly Heraclitus might have resented this association of 
his doctrine with the prejudice of the masses, who do not rise above the false appearances 
of the senses; the judgment of Plato (Theaet., p. 179) and Aristotle (De Anima, I. 2, p. 
405 4, 28: ἐν κινήσει δ᾽ εἶναι τὰ ὄντα κἀκεῖνος ᾧετο Kai οἱ πολλοί) agrees with that of Parmen- 
ides with respect to the matter in question. Parmenides says (ap. Simplicius, Ad Phys., fol. 
19a and 25a): 

Χρή ce λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ᾽ " ἐὸν ἔμμεναι" ἔστι yap εἶναι, 
Μηδὲν δ᾽ οὐκ εἶναι " τά σ᾽ ἐγὼ φράζεσϑαι ἄνωγα.---- 
Πρῶτ᾽ ag’ ὁδοῦ ταύτης διζήσιος εἶργε νόημα, 

Αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ’ ἀπὸ τῆς, n δὴ βροτοὶ εἰδότες οὐδὲν 
Πλάζονται δίκρανοι - ἀμηχανίη γὰρ ἐν αὐτῶν 

Στήϑεσιν ἰϑύνει πλαγκτὸν νόον, οἱ δὲ φορεῦνται 

Κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί te τεϑηφότες, ἀκριτα φῦλα, 

Οἷς τὸ πέλειν τε καὶ οὐκ εἷναι τωὐτὸν νενόμισται 

Kov τωὐτόν͵, πάντων τε παλίντροπός ἐστι κέλευϑος " 


Parmenides (in a passage of some length, given by Simpl., Ad Phys., fol. 31 a b) ascribes 
to the truly existent all the predicates which are implied in the abstract conception of being, 
and then proceeds further to characterize it as a continuous sphere, extending uni- 
formly from the center in all directions—a description which we are scarcely authorized 
in interpreting as merely symbolical, in the conscious intention of Parmenides. That which 
truly is, is without origin and indestructible, a unique whole, only-begotten, immovable, 
and eternal: it was not and will not be, but zs, and forms a continuum, 


Μόνος δ᾽ ἔτει μῦϑος ὁδοῖο 
Λείπεται ὡς ἔστιν -" ταύτῃ δ᾽ ἔπι σήματ᾽ ἔασι 
Πολλὰ μάλ᾽ ὡς ἀγένητον ἐὸν καὶ ἀνώλεϑρόν ἐστιν, 
Οὗλον, μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον - Ἐ 
Ov ποτ’ ἔην οὐδ' ἔσται, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν, 
Ἕν ξυνεχές. 


* Or ἁδέητον, according to Bergk’s conjecture, 





} 
4 
4 


ZENO OF ELEA. 57 


For what origin should it have? How could it grow? It can neither have arisen from 
the non-existent, since this has no existence, nor from the existent, since it is itself the 
existent. There is, therefore, no becoming, and no decay (τὼς γένεσις μὲν ἀπέσβεσται καὶ 
ἄπιστος ὄλεθρος). The truly existent is indivisible, everywhere like itself, and ever iden- 
tical with itself. It exists independently, in and for itself (τωὐτόν τ᾽ ἐν τωὐτῷ Te μένον καθ᾽ 
ἑαυτό τε κεῖται), thinking, and comprehending in itself all thought; it exists in the form of a 
well-rounded sphere (πάντοθεν εὐκύκλου σφαίρης ἐναλίγκιον ὄγκῳ μεσσόθεν ἰσοπαλὲς πάντῃ). 

The Parmenidean doctrine of the apparent world is a cosmogony, suggesting, on the one 
hand, Anaximander’s doctrine of the warm and the cold as the first-developed contraries and 
the Heraclitean doctrine of the transformations of fire, and, on the other, the Pythagorean 
opposition of “limit” and “the unlimited” (a7ecpov), and the Pythagorean doctrine of con- 
traries generally. It is founded on the hypothesis of a universal mixture of warm and 
cold, light and dark. The warm and light is ethereal fire, which, as the positive and efficient 
principle, represents within the sphere of appearance the place of being; the cold and 
dark is air and its product, by condensation (see Euseb., Praepar. Evang., 1. 8, 1: λέγει 
δὲ τὴν γῆν τοῦ πυκνοῦ καταῤῥυέντος ἀέρος γεγονέναι), earth. The combining or ‘‘ mixing” 
of the contraries is effected by the all-controlling Deity (Δαίμων ἢ πάντα κυβερνᾷ), at whose 
will Eros came into existence as first, in time, of the gods (πρώτιστον μὲν Ἔρωτα θεῶν 
μητίσατο πάντων, Plat., Symp., 178 Ὁ, where, as Schanz has shown, the words from ᾿Ησιόδῳ 
to ὁμολογεῖ, together with ὃς must be placed before φησί; Arist., Metaph., 1. 4, 984b, 
26). That which fills space and that which thinks, are the same; how a man shall think, 
depends on the “mixture” of his bodily organs; a dead body perceives cold and silence 
(Parm., ap. Theophrast., De Sensu, 3, where, however, in the sentence: τὸ yap πλέον ἐστὶ 
νόημα, the words τὸ πλέον mean, not the preponderating, but the full, or space which is 
filled). 

If the verse in the long fragment, ap. Simplicius, in Phys., f. 31a, et al. (also ap. Plat., 
Theaet., p. 180): οἷον ἀκίνητόν τ’ ἔμεναι, τῷ πάντ᾽ ὄν ο μ᾽ ἐστίν, ὅσσα βροτοὶ κατέϑεντο πεποιϑότες 
εἶναι ἀληϑῆ, γίγνεσϑαι τε καὶ ὄλλυσϑαι, ete., could be emended (as is done by Gladisch, who 
seeks in it an analogue to the Maja of the Hindus) so as to read: τῷ πάντ᾽ ὄναρ ἐστίν, 
Parmenides would appear as having explained the plurality and change attested by the 
senses, as a dream of the one true existence. But this conjecture is arbitrary; and the 
words cited in the Soph., p. 242: ὡς ἑνὸς ὄντος τῶν πάντων καλουμένων, as also the doctrine 
of the Megarians concerning the many names of the One, which alone really exists, confirm 
the reading ὄνομ᾽ of the MSS. The sense of the passage is therefore: ‘All the manifold 
and changing world, which mortals suppose to be real, and which they call the sum of 
things, zs in reality only the One, which alone truly is.” 

In the philosophy of Parmenides no distinction is reached between appearance, or sem- 
blance, and phenomenon. The terms being and appearance remain with him philosoph- 
ically unreconciled; the existence of a realm of mere appearance is incompatible with the 
fundamental principle of Parmenides. 


§ 20. Zeno of Elea (born about 490-485 8. c.) defended the doctrine 
of Parmenides by an indirect demonstration, in which he sought to 
show that the supposition of the real existence of things manifold 
and changing, leads to contradictions. In particular, he opposed to 
the reality of motion four arguments: 1. Motion can not begin, 
because a body in motion can not arrive at another place until it has 


ριρλ MMA σα. «ψΥΥὰν oe ων ee NM NY ee 


a 


53 ZENO OF ELEA, 


passed through an unlimited number of intermediate places. 2. 
Achilles can not overtake the tortoise, because as often as he reaches 
the place occupied by the tortoise at a previous moment, the latter 
has already left it. 3. The flying arrow is at rest; for it is at every 
moment only in one place. 4. The half of a division of time is equal 
to the whole; for the same point, moving with the same velocity, 
traverses an equal distance (¢. 6., when compared, in the one case, 
with a point at rest, in the other, with a point in motion) in the one 
case, in half of a given time, in the other, in the whole of that time. 


C. H. E. Lohse, De Argumentis, quibus Zeno Eleates nullwm esse motum demonsitravit, Halle, 1794. 
Ch. L, Gerling, De Zenonis Eleatici paralogismis motum spectantibus, Marburg, 1825. 


Zeno, disciple and friend of Parmenides, is reported (by Strabo, VI. 1) to have joined his 
master in his ethico-political efforts, and at last (by Diog. Laért., 1X. 26, and many others), 
after an unsuccessful enterprise against the tyrant Nearchus (or, according to others, 
Diomedon), to have been seized and put to death amid tortures, which he endured with 
steadfastness. 

In the (Platonic?) dialogue Parmenides, a prose writing (σύγγραμμα) of Zeno is men- 
tioned, which was distributed into several series of argumentations (λόγοι), in each of 
which a number of hypotheses (ὑποθέσεις) were laid down with a view to their reductio in 
absurdum, and so to the indirect demonstration of the truth of the doctrine that Being is 
One. It is probably on account of this (indirect) method of demonstration from hypotheses, 
that Aristotle (according to Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 7, and Diog. Laért., VIII. 57; IX. 
25) called Zeno the inventor of dialectic (εὑρετὴν διαλεκτικῆς). 

If the manifold exists, argues Zeno (ap. Simplic., Ad Arist. Phys., fol. 30), it must be at 
the same time infinitely small and infinitely great; the former, because its last divisions 
are without magnitude, the latter, on account of the infinite number of thesé divisions. 
(In this argument Zeno leaves out of consideration the inverse ratio constantly maintained 
between magnitude and number of parts, as the division advances, whereby the same 
product is constantly maintained, and he isolates the notions of smallness and number, 
opposing the one to the other.) In a similar manner Zeno shows that the manifold, if it 
exists, must be at the same time numerically limited and unlimited. 

Zeno argues, further (according to Arist., Phys., IV. 3; ef. Simplic., In Phys., fol. 130), 


against the reality of space. If all that exists were in a given space, this space must be | 


in another space, and so on in infinitum. 

Against the veracity of sensuous perception, Zeno directed (according to Arist., Phys., 
VIL. 5, and Simplic. on this passage) the following argument: If a measure of millet-grains 
in falling produce a sound, each single grain and each smallest fraction of a grain must 
also produce a sound; but if the latter is not the case, then the whole measure of grains, 
whose effect is but the sum of the effects of its parts, can also produce no sound. (The 
method of argumentation here employed is similar to that in the first argument against 
plurality.) 

The arguments of Zeno against the reality of motion (cited by Arist., Phys., VI. 2, p. 233 a, 
21 and 9, p. 239}, 5 seq., and the Commentators) have had no insignificant influence on 
the development of metaphysics in earlier and later times. Aristotle answers the two 
first (¢bid. c. 2) with the observation (p. 288 ἃ, 11) that the divisions of time and space are 
the same and equal (τὰς αὐτὰς yap καὶ τὰς ἴσας διαιρέσεις ὁ χρόνος διαιρεῖται καὶ τὸ péyedoc) 


MELISSUS OF SAMOS. 59 


for both time and space are continuous (συνεχές); that a distance divisible in infinitum can 
therefore certainly be traversed in a finite time, since the latter is also in like manner 
divisible in infinitum, and the divisions of time correspond with the divisions of space; the 
infinite in division (ἄπειρον κατὰ διαίρεσιν) is to be distinguished from the infinite in extent 
(ἀπειρον τοῖς ἐσχάτοις); his reply to the third argument (c. 9) is, that time does not consist 
of single indivisible points (conceived as discontinuous) or of ‘‘nows” (p. 239 Ὁ, 8: ov yap 
σύγκειται ὁ χρόνος EK TOV νῦν τῶν ἀδιαιρέτων). In the fourth argument he points out what 
Zeno, as it seems, had but poorly concealed, viz., the change of the standard of comparison 
(p. 240 a, 2: τὸ μὲν παρὰ κινούμενον, τὸ de’ παρ᾽ ἠρεμοῦν). It can be questioned whether the 
Aristotelian answers are fully satisfactory for the first three arguments (for in the fourth 
the paralogism is obvious). Bayle has attacked them in his Dictionnaire Hist. et Crit. 
(Article, Zénon). Hegel (Geschichte der Phil., I. p. 316 seq.) defends Aristotle against 
Bayle. Yet Hegel himself also sees in motion a contradiction; nevertheless, he regards 
motion as a real fact. Herbart denies the reality of motion on account of the contradiction 
which, in his opinion, it involves.* 


§ 21. Melissus of Samos attempts by a direct demonstration 
to establish the truth of the fundamental thought of the Eleatic 
philosophy, that only the One is. By unity, however, he understands 
rather the continuity of substance than the notional 1] identity of being. 
That which #s, the truly existent, is eternal, infinite, one, in all points 
the same or “like itself,” ἘΠ ἘΠ and passionless. 


It is extremely probable that Melissus the philosopher is identical with Melissus the 
statesman and admiral, who commanded the fleet of the Samians on the occasion of their 
victory over the Athenians, 440 B. c. (Plut., Pericl., c. 26; Themist., c. 2; Thucyd., I. 117), 

Several fragments of the work of Melissus, “On the Existent” (or ‘‘On Nature”) are 
found in Simplic., Ad Arist. Phys. (fol. 7, 22, 24, and 34), and Jd., in Arist. De Coelo (fol. 
137); with them agrees almost exactly the section on this philosopher in the Pseudo- 
Aristotelian work, De Melisso, etc. Cf. the works of Brandis, Mullach, and others cited 
above (§ 17). 

If nothing were, argues Melissus, how were it then even possible to speak of it, as 
of something being? But if any thing is, then it has either become or is eternal, In the 
former case, it must have arisen either from being or from non-being. But nothing can 

-come from non-being; and being can not have arisen from being, for then there must 
have been being, before being came to be (became). Hence being did not become; hence 
it is eternal. It will also not perish; for being can not become non-being, and if being 
change to being, it has not perished. Therefore it always was and always will be. 

As without genesis, and indestructible, being has no beginning and no end; it is, there- 
fore, infinite. (It is easy to perceive here the leap in argumentation from temporal 
infinity to the infinity of space, which very hkely contributed essentially to draw on Me- 
lissus Aristotle's reproach of feebleness of thought.) 

As infinite, being is One; for if it were dual or plural, its members would mutually 
limit each other, and so it would not be infinite. 

As one, being is unchangeable; for change would pluralize it. More particularly, it is 


* In my “ System der Logik,” 2d ed., Bonn, 1865, pp. 176, 387 seq., 1 haye discussed these problems 
more thoroughly than was possible or appropriate in this place. 


60 THE LATER NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS. 


unmoved; for there exists no empty space in which it can move, since such a space, if it 
existed, would be an existing nothing; and being can not move within itself, for then the 
One would become a divisum, hence manifold. 

Notwithstanding the infinite extension which Melissus attributes to being, he will not 
have it called material, since whatever is material has parts, and so can not be a unity. 


§ 22. While the later Natural Philosophers asserted with the 
Eleatics the immutability of substance, they assumed, in opposition 
to the Eleatics, a plurality of unchangeable substances, and reduced 
all development and change, all apparent genesis and destruction, to 
a change in the relations of these substances to one another. In 
order to explain the orderly change of relations, Empedocles and 
\Anaxagoras taught the existence of a spiritual force in addition to 
the material substances, while the Atomistic philosophers (Leucippus 
and Democritus) sought to comprehend all phenomena as products 
of matter and motion alone. The hylozoism of the earlier natural 
philosophers was thus superseded in principle by the severance of the 
moving cause from matter; yet its after-influence remained quite 
considerable, as seen chiefly in the doctrines of Empedocles, and also, 
but less prominently, in those of Anaxagoras and the Atomists, 
Anaxagoras (and Empedocles also, so far as love and hate are repre- 
sented by him as independent forces, separate from the material 
elements) advanced in principle to a Dualism of mind and matter ; 
while the Atomists proceeded to Materialism. 





The earliest Greek philosophers advanced gradually but constantly from the sphere of 
sensuous intuition toward the sphere of abstractions. This movement culminated, with the 
Eleatic philosophers, in the most abstract of all conceptions, the conception of Being. Bute 
from the stand-point thus reached it was found impossible to furnish an explanation of | 
phenomena; hence the tendency among the philosophers immediately subsequent to the 
Eleatics, so to conceive the principle of things that, without denying the unity and con- | 
stancy of being, a way might yet be opened up leading to the plurality and change of the | 
phenomenal world. In particular, they sought to account for the change and developmen | 
or the becoming of things, which (like their being) remained unexplained in the conceptions 
of the earlier natural philosophers, by reducing the same to the motion (combination and 
separation) of elements, whose quality is invariable. The boundary-line, which separates, 
the earlier from the later natural philosophy, lies in the Eleatic philosophy, or more pre- 
cisely in the ontology of Parmenides—not in Xenophanes’ theological doctrine of unity. 

Heraclitus, who taught later than Xenophanes, but earlier than Parmenides, belongs, by 
the character of his doctrine, to the earlier philosophers, and is not to be associated with 
the group formed by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. 


§ 23. Empedocles of Agrigentum, born not long after 500 8. c., 
posits in his didactic poem “On Nature,” as the material principles 
or “roots” of things, the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, to 


EMPEDOCLES OF AGRIGENTUM. 61 


which he joins as moving forces two ideal principles: love as a uniting, 
and hate as a separating force. The periods of the formation of the 
world depend on the alternate prevalence of love and hate. During 
certain periods all heterogeneous elements are separated from each 
other by hate; during others, they are everywhere united by love. 
We know things in their material and ideal elements by virtue of 
the like material and ideal elements in ourselves. 


Special works on Empedocles are the following: Frid. Guil. Sturz, De Empedoclis Agrigentini vita et 
philosophia expos., carminum relig. coll., Leips. 1805; Amadeus Peyron, Empedoclis et Parmenidis 
Fragmenta, Leips. 1810; H. Ritter, Veber die philosophische Lehre des Empedokles, in Wolf's Litera- 
rische Analekten, Vol. I1., 1820, p. 411 seq.; Lommatzsch, Die Weisheit des Empedokies, Berl. 1830; Simon 
Karsten, Emp. Agrig. carminum reliquiae (vol. 2 of the Reliquiae phil. vet. Graec.), Amst. 1858; Th, 
Bergk, Emp. fragmenta, in the Poét. lyr. Gr., Leips. (1848, °53) 1866; De prooemio Empedoclis, Berl. 
1839; Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 116-129; Panzerbieter, Beitrdge zur Kritik und Erlduterung des 
Empedokles, Meiningen, 1844, and Zeitschr. f. A. W., 1845, pp. 883 seq.; Raynaud, De Emp., Strasburg, 
1948; Mullach, De Emp. prooemio, Berlin, 1850; Quaestionum Emp. specimen secundum, ib. 1852; Philos. 
Gr. fragm., XIV. seq.,15seq.; Heinrich Stein, Bmp. Agrig. fragmenta ed., praemissa disp. de Empedoclis 
scriptis, Bonn, 1852; W. Hollenberg, Hmpedoclea, Berlin, 1853 (" Gymnasial-Programm”); E. Ἐς Apelt, 
Parmenidis et Empedoclis doctrina de mundi structura, Jena, 1856; A. Gladisch, Hmpedokles und 
die Aegypter, eine histor. Untersuchung, mit Eriiiuterungen aus den aegypt. Denkmdlern von H. 
Brugsch und Jos. Passalacqua, Leipsic, 1858; cf. Gladisch, Emp. und die alten Aegypter, in Noack’s 
Jahrb. fiir speculat. Philos., 1847, Heft 4, No. 82, Heft 5, No. 41; Das mystische vierspeichige Rad bet 
den alten Aegyptern und Hellenen, in the Zeitschr. der deutschen morgenlind. Gesellschaft, Vol. XV., 
Heft 2, p. 406 seq.; H. Winnefeld, Die Philosophie des Empedokles (“ Donaueschinger Gymn.-Pro- 
gramm”), Rastatt, 1862. 


The testimony of Aristotle (Met., I. 3) requires us to consider Empedocles as a contem- 
porary of Anaxagoras, but younger than the latter philosopher, who was born, probably, 
about 500 B. c. According to Aristotle (ap. Diog. L., VIII. 52, 74), he lived sixty years, so 
that we may (with Zeller) adopt 492 and 432 as the approximate dates of his birth and 
death, respectively. His family belonged to the democratic party, for which Empedocles, 
like his father Meton, labored successfully. He visited numerous cities in Sicily and Italy 
in the character of physician, sacrificial priest, and thaumaturgist, claiming for himself 
magical powers. Aristotle is said (Diog. L., VIII. 57, IX. 25; Sext. Emp., VII. 6) to have 
termed him the inventor of rhetoric, as he called Zeno the inventor of dialectic. 

We know with certainty of only two works written by Empedocles: περὶ φύσεως and 
καθαρμοί (Diog. L., VIII. 77); the ἰατρικὸς λόγος (mentioned by Diog., ébid.) may have been a 
part of the φυσικά, and of the tragedy, which was ascribed to him by some, others deny 
that he was the author (Diog. L., VIII. 57). 

Empedocles combats the hypothesis of absolute generation and decay: nothing, which 
previously was not, can come into being, and nothing existing can be annihilated. The 
phenomena usually referred to those heads result respectively from the commingling and 
separation of elements (sig«¢ διάλλαξίς τε μιγέντων) ; actual origination (φύσις) is a name void 
of objective meaning. The mingling of elements is the work of Love (φιλότης, στοργῆ, ’Aopo- 
dirn), their separation is effectuated by Hate (Neixoc); to the former Empedocles applies 
the predicate ἠπεόφρων (kindly disposed), the latter he terms destructive, baneful, furious 
(ovAduevor, λυγρόν, μαινόμενον), so that obviously the opposition of these two forces was in 
his mind in a certain sense identical with that of good and evil. The primitive material 
elements, which remain unchanged in all mixture and separation, are fire (πῦρ, ἡλέκτωρ, 
"Havoc, Ἥφαιστος, Ζεὺς apyic), air (αἰθήρ, οὐρανός, “Ἥρη φερέσβιος), water (ὕδωρ, ὄμβρος, 


62 EMPEDOCLES OF AGRIGENTUM. 


πόντος, θάλασσα, Νῆστις), and earth (γῆ, χθὼν, ’Aidwveic). Empedocles cali these elements 
roots (τέσσαρα τῶν πάντων ῥιζώματα). 

In their original condition the elements are described by Empedocles as being all 
mingled together and forming one all-including sphere (ogaipoc; Aristotle, following the 
sense of Empedocles, terms the ogaipoc the εὐδαιμονέστατος θεός, Met., 111. 4, p. 1000 6.8} 
In this sphere love is supreme and hate is powerless. By the gradual development, how- 
ever, of the influence of hate the elements become separated and individual things and 
beings come into existence. When the extreme of separation is reached, when hate alone 
rules and love is inactive, individual existence disappears again. Then follows a period when 
love regains its power and unites what was separated, while individual existences appear 
anew, till at last, love becoming, as at first, sole ruler, individual things again disappear and 
the original condition is restored. The changes thus described are then repeated in the 
same order, and continue without end to follow each other in periodical succession. Cf. 
Arist., Phys., VIII. 1; Plat. (?), Soph., p. 242. 

Of the members of the organic creation, the plants sprang first from the earth, while 
the latter was still in process of development. After them came the animals, their dif- 
ferent parts having first formed themselves independently and then been joined by love; 
subsequently, the ordinary method of reproduction took the place of this original genera- 
tion (Plutarch, De Plac. Philos., V. 19, 26). At first eyes, arms, etc., existed separately ; 
as the result of their combination arose many monstrosities, which perished; those com- 
binations which were capable of subsisting, persisted, and propagated themselves. Em- 
pedocles, in Arist., De Coelo, 111. 2, and Simplic., Comm. in De Coelo, f. 144 Ὁ: 


"He πολλαὶ μὲν κόρσαι ἀναύχενες ἐβλάστησαν, 
Τυμνοὶ δ᾽ ἐπλάζοντο βραχίονες εὔνιδες Opwr, 
Ὄμματα δ᾽ οἱ ἐπλανᾶτο πενητεύοντα μετώπων. 

— Αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κατὰ μεῖζον ἐμίσγετο δαίμονι δαίμων, 
Ταῦτά τε συμπίπτεσκον͵ ὅπη συνέκυρσεν ἕκαστα, 
᾿Αλλά τε πρὸς τοῖς πολλὰ διηνεκὲς ἐξεγένοντο. 


By the δαίμονες the elements are apparently to be understood, ᾿Αἰδωνεύς, Νήστις, ete. This 
doctrine of Empedocles is thus expressed by Aristotle, Phys., 11.8: ὅπου μὲν οὖν ἅπαντα συνέβη 
ὥσπερ Kav εἰ ἕνεκά Tov ἐγίνετο, ταῦτα μὲν ἐσώθη ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτομάτου συστάντα ἐπιτηδείως * ὅσα δὲ 
μή οὕτως, ἀπώλετο καὶ ἀπόλλυται, καθάπερ ᾿Εμπεδοκλῆς λέγει τὰ βουγενῆ ἀνδρόπρωρα, to which 
Aristotle replies, that the organisms constructed in apparent conformity to a plan, do not 
appear singly, as would be expected if their origin were fortuitous, but 7 ἀεὶ ἢ ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ TOAD, 

Since the higher forms of life can only arise out of the lower, these latter must be 
regarded as the lower stages, through which the former must pass. Empedocles says (ap. 
Diog. L., VIII. 77): 


Ἤδη yap ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη TE 
Θάμνος 7 οἰωνός τε καὶ εἰν ἁλὶ ἔλλοπος ἰχθύς. Ἔ 


* This doctrine may be compared with the natural philosophy of Schelling and Oken and the theory 
of derivation as propounded by Lamarck and Darwin; still, according to the latter, the progress from lower 
to higher in the development of species is rather aresult of successive differentiations of simple forms, while 
the Empedoclean doctrine views it as resulting from the combination of heterogeneous forms; but even 
this difference is only relative. Ernst Hackel. an investigator who has adopted the theory of Darwin and 
contributed to its further development, traces (in his Naturl. Schopfungsgeachichte, 2d ed., Berlin, 1870) the 
‘genealogical tree of man” from the “ monadic” forms of life down through primitive animals of one and 
of many cells, radiate infusoria, worms, fishes, reptiles, marsupialia, apes end orang-outangs, ending, 
finally, with “speech-endowed man,” 











ANAXAGORAS, HERMOTIMUS, AND ARCHELAUS. 63 


Empedocles explains the workings of distant bodies on each other, and the possibility 
of the mixture of elements, by the hypothesis of effluxes (ἀποῤῥοαί) proceeding from all 
objects, and of pores (πόροι), into which these effluxes enter; some effluxes are adapted 
to specific pores, for which others would be too large or too small. By this theory 
Empedocles also accounts for sensuous perception. In the case of seeing, a twofold 
efflux takes place: on the one hand, effluxes pass from the objects seen to the eye (Plat., 
Meno, p. 16; Arist., De Sensu et Sensibili, c. 2, Ὁ. 438 ἃ, 4: ταῖς ἀποῤῥοίαις ταῖς ἀπὸ τῶν 
ὁρωμένων), while, on the other hand, effluxes from its own internal fire and water pass out 
through the pores of the eye (Emped. in Arist., p. 437 b, 26 seq. : ‘‘ Delicate nets in the eye 
retain the mass of circumambient water, but the fire, wherever it extends, pierces through, 
as rays of light pass through a lantern,”—in reply to which Aristotle [p. 437 b, 13] objects, 
that we ought then to be able to see in the dark). The perceived image arises on the meeting 
of the two streams. Light needs a certain time in which to come from the sun to us 
(Arist., De An., 11.6; De Sensu, c. 6; Aristotle controverts this theory). Sounds arise in the 
trumpet-shaped auditory passage on the entrance of air in motion. The sensations of smell 
and taste depend also on the penetration of fine particles of matter into the appropriate organs 
(Arist., De Sensu, c. 2,4; Theophr., De Sensu, 9). Empedocles ascribed sensation and 
desire (as did also Anaxagoras and Democritus) to plants (Pseudo-Arist., περὶ φυτῶν, 1. 1). 

We know each element of things through the corresponding element in ourselves, or 
like by like (ἡ γνῶσις τοῦ ὁμοίου τῷ ὁμοίῳ, Emped., ap. Arist., De Anima, I. 2; Metaph., 111. 4, 
1000 b, 6; Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 121, etc.): 

γαίῃ μὲν yap γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι J ὕδωρ, 
αἰϑέρι δ᾽ αἰϑέρα diov, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀΐδηλον, 
στοργῇ δὲ στοργὴν. νεῖκος δέ τε νείκεϊ λυγρῷ" 
ἐκ τούτων γὰρ πάντα πεπήγασιν ἁρμοσϑέντα, 


Ν / ΄ Ν “ ν᾽ , ᾿ - 
καὶ τούτοις φρονέουσι καὶ ἤδοντ᾽ ἠδ᾽ ἀνιῶνται. 


With the philosophemes peculiar to him, Empedocles united the Pythagorean doctrine of 
the transmigration of souls (but modified and adapted to his system in the sense above 
indicated) and a doctrine similar to that of Xenophanes concerning the spirituality of the 
Deity (unless the loci in which this is affirmed are taken, say, from a work falsely attributed 
to Empedocles). 


§ 24. Anaxagoras of Clazomenz (in Asia-Minor), born about 500 
B. c., reduced all origin and decay to a process of mingling and un- 
mingling, but assumed as ultimate elements an unlimited number of 
primitive, qualitatively determinate substances, which were called by 
him seeds of things, by Aristotle, elements consisting of homogeneous 
parts, and by later writers (employing a term formed from the Aris- 
totelian phraseology) Hommomeriz. Originally there existed, accord- 
ing to Anaxagoras, an orderless mixture of these diminutive parts: 
“all things were together.” But the divine mind, which, as the finest 
among all things, is simple, unmixed and passionless reason, brought 
order to them, and ont of chaos formed the world. In the explana- 
tion of individual existence, Anaxagoras confined himself, according 
to the testimony of Plato and Aristotle, to the search for mechanical 


64 ANAXAGORAS, HERMOTIMUS, AND ARCHELAUS. 


causes, and only fell back on the agency of the divine reason, when 
he was unable to recognize the presence of such causes. 

Essentially the same doctrine of the world-ordering mind is 
ascribed, among earlier philosophers, to Hermotimus of Clazomene, 
and among the later, to Archelaus of Miletus (or, according to 
others, of Athens). 


Of the legends of Hermotimus of Clazomenne treat Friedr. Ang. Carus,in Filleborn’s Beitrage zur 
Geschichte der Philos., Vol. 111... Art. 9, 1798, repr. in Carus’ Vachgel. Werke (Vol. 1V.: deen zur Gesch. 
der Philos.), Leipsic, 1809, pp. 380-892 ; Ignat. Denzinger, De Hermot. Clazomenio comment, Liege, 1825. 

On Anaxagoras, cf. Friedr. Aug. Carus, De Anax. cosmotheologiae fontibus, Leipsic, 1797, and in 
Carus’ Jdeen zur Gesch. der Philos., Leips. 1809, pp. 689-762, Anaxagoras aus Klazomend und sein Zett- 
geist, in Filleborn’s Beitr. zur Gesch. der Philos., Art. 10,1799, and in Carus’ Jdeen zur Gesch. der 
Philos., pp. 395-478; J. T. Hemsen, Anam. Claz., Gott. 1821; Ed. Schaubach, Anam. Claz. fragm., Leips. 
1827; Guil. Schorn, Anaw. Claz. et Diogenis Appolloniatae fragmenta, Bonn, 1829; F. J. Clemens, De 
philosophia Anavagorae Clazomenii, Berlin, 1839; Fr. Breier, Die Philosophie des Anaxagoras von 
Klazomenae nach Aristoteles, Berlin, 1840; Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 60-68; C. M. Zévort, Dissert. sur 
la vte et la doctrine αὐ Anaxagore, Paris, 1848; Franz Hoffman, Ueber die Gottesidee des Anaxagoras, 
Sokrates, und Platon, Wirzburg, 1860 (" Glickwunsch-Programm” to the University of Berlin), ef. Mi- 
chelet, in “ Der Gedanke,”’ Vol. 11. No.1, pp. 33-44, and Hoffmann’s reply in Fichte’s Zeitschrift fiir 
Ph. u. ph. Kritik, new series, Vol. 40, 1862, pp. 1-48; Aug. Gladisch, Anaw. und die Israeliten, 
Leipsic, 1864, cf. Gladisch on Anaw. und die alten Israeliten, in Niedner’s Zeitschr. fiir histor. Theol., 
1849, Heft 4, No. 14; C. Alexi, Anaw. u. 5. Philosophie, nach den Fragmenten bei Simplicius ad Arist. 
(G.-Pr.), Neu-Ruppin, 1867; Heinr. Beckel, Anax. doctrina de rebus animatis (diss.), Minster, 1868. 


Anaxagoras was descended from a reputable family in Clazomenze. From this city he 
removed to Athens. Here he lived a long time as the friend of Pericles, until, having 
been accused of impiety on account of his philosophical opinions by the political opponents 
of the great statesman, he found himself compelled to seek safety in Lampsacus, where he 
is said to have died soon afterward. The chronological data respecting him are in part 
discrepant. The accusation took place, according to Diodorus (IX. 38 sq.) and Plutarch 
(Pericl., ο. 38), in the last years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war. Allowing 
this date to be correct, it is inadmissible, with K. Ἐς Hermann (De Philos. Jonic. aetatibus, 
Gott. 1849, p. 13 seq.), to place the birth of the philosopher in Olymp. 61.3 (534 B. C.); it 
is more probable that the version of Apollodorus (ap. Diog. L., 11. 7) is the correct one, 
and that Anaxagoras was born in Olymp. 70 (500-496). If he lived im all seventy-two 
years (as Diog., ibid., reports), the date of his death must be Olymp. 88 (for which we 
read in Diog., 78—probably an error). In Athens he is said to have lived thirty years; the 
statement referred (by Diog. L., II. 7) to Demetrius Phalereus, that he began to philosophize 
in the twentieth year of his life at Athens, while Callias (Calliades?) was archon, probably 
arose from a misinterpretation of the report that he began to philosophize while Callias 
was archon at Athens. The statement of Aristotle (Metaph., 1. 3), that Anaxagoras was 
prior to Empedocles in point of age, but subsequent in respect of his (philosophical) per- 
formances (τῇ μὲν ἡλικίᾳ πρότερος, τοῖς δ᾽ ἔργοις ὕστερος), is probably to be taken purely 
chronologically, and not as pointing to a relative inferiority or advance in philosophical 
insight. The difference of age can not have been great. Anaxagoras seems already to 
have known and to have accepted in a modified form the doctrines of Empedocles. 

The written work of Anaxagoras (περὶ φύσεως) is mentioned by Plato (Phaedo, p. 97) 
and others. 

In the place of the four elements of Empedocles, Anaxagoras assumes the existence 
of an infinite number of elementary and original substances. Every thing that has parts 








ANAXAGORAS, HERMOTIMUS, AND ARCHELAUS. 65 


qualitatively homogeneous with the whole, owes its origin, according to Anaxagoras (as 
reported by Aristotle, Met., I. 3), to the coming’ together (σύγκρισις) of these parts from the 
state of dispersion among other elements, in which they had existed from the beginning. 
This combination of the homogeneous is, in his view, that which really takes place in what 
is called becoming or generation. ach primitive particle remains unchanged by this 
process. In like manner, that which is called destruction, is in fact only separation 
(διάκρισις). Every thing whose parts are homogeneous with the whole (6. σ., flesh, blood, 
bones, gold, silver), Aristotle calls in jis terminology ὁμοιομερές, in opposition to the 
ἀνομοιομερές (6. g., the animal, and, in general, the organism as a whole), the parts of which 
are of diverse quality. The expression τὸ ὁμοιομερές, τὰ ὁμοιομερῆ does not denote 
originally the homogeneous parts themselves, but the whole, whose parts are homo- 
geneous with each other; but it can also be applied to the parts themselves as smaller 
wholes, since in that which has throughout the same quality the parts of every part must 
be homogeneous with one another. In Metaph., I. 3, Aristotle calls the wholes, which, 
according to Anaxagoras, arise by the mingling together of homogeneous parts, ὁμοιομερῆ; 
in other places he gives the same name to the parts, e. g., De Coelo, III. 3: flesh and bones, 
etc., consist ἐζ ἀοράτων ὁμοιομερῶν πάντων ἠθροισμένων; cf. De Gen. et Corr., I. 1: Anax- 
agoras represents those substances which have like parts, 6. g., boues, etc., as the ele- 
mentary substances (τὰ ὁμοιομερῇ στοιχεῖα τίθησιν, οἷον ὀστοῦν καὶ σάρκα καὶ μυελόν). 
Lucretius says (I. 834 seq.) that, according to Anaxagoras, every rerum homoeomeria, 6. 9., 
bones, intestines, etc., consists of smallest substances of the same kind. The plural ὁμοι- 
ομέρειαι is used by later writers (6. g., Plut., Pericl., c. 4; νοῦν azoxpivovta τὰς ὁμοιομερείας) 
to designate the primitive, ultimate particles themselves (cf. Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., X. 25: 
οἱ yap ἀτόμους εἰπόντες ἢ ὁμοιομερείας ἢ ὄγκους, and Diog. L., 11. 8: ἀρχὰς τὰς ὁμοιομερείαε). 
Anaxagoras himself calls these original constituents of things ‘‘ seeds” (σπέρματα), and also 
less precisely (like the objects which they constitute), “things” (χρήματα). But not every 
thing which appears to have like parts is held by Anaxagoras to possess them indeed. Itis 
true that Aristotle in one place, immediately after referring to Empedocles, cites (Met., I. 3) 
water and fire as examples of substances of homogeneous parts. But where he expresses 
himself more exactly concerning the opinion of Anaxagoras (De Gen. et Corr., I. 1; De Coelo, 
III. 3), he says expressly that the latter regarded precisely those substances which with 
Empedocles passed for elementary,—fire, air, water, and earth,—as not internally homo- 
geneous, but as compounds of numerous heterogeneous particles. 

Anaxagoras finds the moving and shaping force of the world neither (with the old 
Jonians) in the nature of the matter assumed as principle itself, nor (with Empedocles) in 
impersonal psychical potencies, like love and hate, but in a world-ordering mind (νοῦς). 
(Anaxagoras, ap. Simplicius, in Ar. Phys., fol. 35a: ὁκοῖα ἔμελλεν ἔσεσθαι καὶ ὁκοῖα ἦν καὶ 
ἄσσα νῦν ἔστι καὶ ὁκοῖα ἔσται, πάντα διεκόσμησε νόος.) This mind is distinguished from mate- 
rial natures by its simplicity, independence, knowledge, and supreme power over matter. 
Every thing else is mixed with parts of all other things besides itself, but mind (νόος) is 
pure, unmixed, and subject only to itself. All minds, whatever their relative power or 
station, are (qualitatively) alike. The mind is the finest of things (λεπτότατον πάντων 
χρημάτων). Matter, which is inert and without order, it brings into motion, and there- 
by creates out of chaos the orderly world. There is no fate (eiuapuévy) and no chance 
(τύ χη). 

In the primitive condition of things the most heterogeneous substances were, according 
to Anaxagoras, everywhere intermingled (Anaxagoras, ap. Simplicius, in Arist. Phys., fol. 
33b: ὁμοῦ πάντα χρήματα ἦν, ἄπειρα καὶ πλῆθος καὶ σμικρότηπα, the first words of the work 
of Anaxagoras). When matter had thus remained inert during an indeterminate period, 

5 


00 ANAXAGORAS, HERMOTIMUS, AND ARCHELAUS. 


the Mind worked upon it, communicating to it motion and order (Arist., Phys., VIII. 1, p. 
250 b, 24: φησὶ yap ἐκεῖνος [’Avagayopac], ὁμοῦ πάντων ὄντων καὶ ἠρεμούντων τὸν ἄπειρον 
χρόνον, κίνησιν ἐμποιῆσαι τὸν νοῦν καὶ διακρῖναι). 

The Mind first effected a revolving motion at a single point; but ever-increasing masses 
were gradually brought within the sphere of this motion, which is still incessantly extending 
farther and farther in the infinite realm of matter. As the first consequence of this 
revolving motion, the elementary contraries, fire and air, water and earth, were separated 
from each other. Buta complete separation of dissimilar and union of similar elements 
was far from being hereby attained, and it was necessary that within each of the masses 
resulting from this first act, the same process should be repeated. By this means alone 
could things originate, having parts really homogeneous, e. g., gold, blood, ete. But even 
these consist not entirely, but only prevailingly, of like parts. In gold, for example, 
however pure it may seem, there are, says Anaxagoras, not merely particles of gold, but 
also particles of other metals and of all other things; but the denomination follows the 
predominant constituent. 

In the middle of the world rests the earth, which is shaped like a short section 
of a cylinder, and is supported by the air. The stars are material; the moon is inhabited 
like the earth; the sun is a glowing mass οἵ stone (uidpo¢ διάπυρος, Diog. L., 11. 12), and 
the stars are of like nature. The moon receives its light from the sun. The sky is 
full of stones, which occasionally fall to the earth, when the force of their revolving 
motion is relaxed; witness the meteor of Aegospotomos (Diog. L., I]. 8-12). Plants have 
souls; they sorrow and rejoice. Plants and animals owe their origin to the fecundation 
of the earth, whence they sprung, by germs previously contained in the air (Theophrast., 
Hist. Plant., WI. 1, 4; De Causts plantarum, I. 5, 2). In our perception of things by the 
senses, like is not known by like, but by unlike, e. g., heat by cold, cold by heat; that 
which is equally warm (etc.) with ourselves, makes no impression on us. The senses 
are too weak to know the truth; they do not sufficiently distinguish the constituents 
of things (Anaxagoras, ap. Sextus Empir., Adv. Math. VII. 90: ὑπὸ ἀφαυρότητος αὐτῶν ov 
δυνατοί ἐσμεν κρίνειν τἀληθές). By the mind we know the world of external objects ; 
every thing is known to the divine reason (Anax., ap. Simplic., in Phys., f. 33: πάντα ἔγνω 
νόος). The highest satisfaction is found in the thinking knowledge of the universe. 

The explanation of phenomena sought by Anaxagoras was essentially the genetic and 
physical; he did not investigate the nature of their order, which he referred to the νοῦς. 
For this reason Plato and Aristotle (whom, in this particular, Plotinus follows, Hnnead., 
I. 4, 7) charge that his νοῦς plays a rather idle réle. Plato, in the Phaedo (p. 97 ὁ.) 
represents Socrates as saying that he had rejoiced to see the νοῦς designated as cause 
of the order of the world, and had supposed that as the reason why every thing is 
as it is, the fitness of its being so (the final cause) would be pointed out; but that 
in this expectation he had been fully deceived, since Anaxagoras specified only me- 
chanical causes. Cf. Leg., XII. 967b. Aristotle praises Anaxagoras in view of his 
principle; in rising to the conception of a world-ordering mind, he was like a sober man 
coming among the drunken; but he knew not how to make the most of this principle, and 
employed the νοῦς only as a mechanical god for a make-shift, wherever the knowledge of 
natural causes failed him (Metaph., I. 4). If, now, another thinker directed his attention 
only to that which the νοῦς really was for Anaxagoras, not to the word and the possible 
content of the concept, he must consider a νοῦς as cause of motion and distinct from mate- 
rial objects, to be unnecessary (following a line of thought similar to that of Laplace and 
others, in modern times, who ridicule the “God” of the earlier astronomers, as only 
“standing upon one side and giving things a push’’). Such a philosopher would neces- 








THE ATOMISTS: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. 67 


sarily deem it a more scientific procedure to reject the dualism of Anaxagoras, and find in 
things themselves the sufficient causes of their motions. It is thus that the doctrine of 
Democritus stands contrasted with the doctrine of Anaxagoras. On the other hand, the 
conception of the νοῦς might occasion a real investigation of the nature of mind, and conse- 
quently conduct beyond mere cosmology. In this way, though not till a later period, the 
Anaxagorean principle continued to exert an influence, not so much in the teachings of 
the Sophists, as, rather, in those of Socrates and his continuators. 

Of Hermotimus, Aristotle says (Metaph., I. 3) that the hypothesis of ἃ world- 
ordering mind was ascribed to him; but that nothing certain or precise was known 
in regard to his doctrine. Later writers repeat many miraculous legends concerning 
the man. Probably he belongs to the ancient ‘‘theologians” or cosmogonists. (See 
above, p. 26.) 

Archelaus, the most important among the disciples of Anaxagoras, appears to have 
interpreted the original medley of all substances as equivalent to air, and to have toned 
down the antithesis between mind and matter, thus receding again nearer to the older 
Ionic natural philosophy, and in this respect oceupying a position relative to Anaxagoras 
similar to that of his contemporary, Diogenes of Apollonia (mentioned above, § 14, pp. 
37 and 38). The doctrine that right and wrong are not natural distinctions (φύσει), but 
depend on human institution, is ascribed to Archelaus. 

Another disciple of Anaxagoras, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, interpreted the Homeric 
poems allegorically ; by Zeus the νοῦς was to be understood, by Athene art (τέχνη). 

The fine verses, in which Euripides (ap. Clem. Alex., Strom., IV. 25, § 157), with un- 
mistakable reference to Anaxagoras, sings the praises of the investigator, may here be 
cited : 

"OABtoc ὅστις τῆς ἱστορίας 
ἔσχε μάθησιν, μήτε πολιτῶν 
ἐπὶ πημοσύνας, μήτ᾽ εἰς ἀδίκους 
πράξεις ὁρμῶν, 

ἀλλ᾽ ἀθανάτου καθορῶν φύσεως 
κόςμον ἀγήρω, τίς τε συνέστη 
καὶ ὅπῃ καὶ ὅπως" 

τοῖς τοιούτοις οὐδέποτ᾽ αἰσχρῶν 
ἔργων μελέτημα προσίζει. 


§ 25. Lencippus of Abdera (or Miletus, or Elea) and Democritus 
of Abdera, the latter, according to his own statement, forty years 
younger than Anaxagoras, were the founders of the Atomistic phi- 
losophy. These philosophers posit, as principles of things, the “ full” 
and the “void,” which they identify respectively with being and non- 
being or something and nothing, the latter, as well as the former, 
having existence. They characterize the “full” more particularly, 
as consisting of indivisible, primitive particles of matter, or atoms, 
which are distinguished from one another, not by their intrinsic 
qualities, but only geometrically, by their form, position, and arrange- 
ment. Fire and the soul are composed of round atoms. Sensation 
is due to material images, which come from objects and reach the soul 


68 THE ATOMISTS: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. 


through the senses. The ethical end of man is happiness, which is 
attained through justice and culture. 


Of Democritus treat Schleiermacher, Ueber das Verzeichniss der Schriften des Demokrit bei Diog. L. 
(TX. 45 seq.), read Jan. 9, 1515, and printed in his Sdmmtl. Werke, 3d div., Vol. 8, pp. 298-805; Geffers, 
Quaest. Dem., Gott. 1829; J. Ε΄ W. Burchard, Democriti philosophiae de sensibus fragmenta, Minden, 
1850; Fragmente der Moral des Abderiten Demokritus, Minden, 1834; Papencordt, De atomicorum doc- 
trina, Berlin, 1832; Frid. Heimsoeth, Democriti de anima doctrina, Bonn, 1835; Krische, Forschungen, 
I. pp. 142-163; Frid. Guil. Aug. Mullach, Quaestionem Democritearum spec. I-LI., Berlin, 1885-42; Demo- 
critt operum fragmenta coll., rec., vertit, explic. ac de philosophi vita, scriptis et plavitis commen- 
tatus est, Berlin, 1848; Fragm. ph. Gr., 1. p. 3380 seq.; B. ten Brink, Anecdota Epicharmi, Democriti, etc., 
in the Philologus, V1. 1851, p. 577 seq.; Democriti de se ipso testimonia, ib. p. 589 seq., VII., 1852, p. 354 
seq.; Democriti liber περὶ ἀνθρώπον φύσιος, ibid. VIII. 1858, p. 414 seq.; Ed. Johnson, Der Sensualismus 
des Demokrit (G.-Pr.), Plauen, 1868. 


Of the age of Leucippus and the circumstances of his life little is definitely known; it is 
also uncertain whether he wrote any thing himself, or whether Aristotle and others drew 
their information concerning his opinions from the writings of his pupil Democritus. 
Aristotle commonly names him in connection with Democritus. The statement (Diog. L., 
1X. 30), that he heard Zeno, the Eleatic, receives confirmation from the character of his 
doctrine. That the principles of his philosophy were largely derived from the Eleatics is 
also testified by Aristotle, De Gen. et Corr., I. 8, 325, 26. 

Democritus of Abdera, in his work μικρὸς Δεάκοσμος, said (according to Diog. L., IX. 41) 
that he wrote this work 780 years after the capture of Troy, and that he was forty years 
younger than Anaxagoras. He must, according to the latter statement, have been born 
about 460 B. c., with which date agrees the statement of Apollodorus (ap. Diog. L., ibid.), 
that he was born Ol. 80; according to Thrasyllus (ébid.), Ol. 77.3 = 470 B. c.; but for the 
date of the capture of Troy Democritus appears to have assumed, instead of 1184, the 
year 1150, whence we derive, as the date of the composition of the work named, the year 
420 B.c. He is said to have died at a great age (ninety years old; according to others, 
one hundred, or even more). Desire for knowledge led him to undertake extended jour- 
neys, Hgypt and the Orient being among the places visited by him. Plato never mentions 
him, and speaks only with contempt of the materialistic doctrine. Plato desired, according 
to the narrative of Aristoxenus, the Aristotelian (in his ἱστορικὰ ὑπομνήματα, see Diog. L., 
IX. 40), that the writings of Democritus should be burned, but was convinced by the 
Pythagoreans Amyclas and Clinias, of the uselessness of such a proceeding, since the 
books were already widely circulated. Aristotle speaks of Democritus with respect. 

Democritus wrote numerous works, among which the μέγας Διάκοσμος was the most 
celebrated. His style is greatly praised by Cicero, Plutarch, and Dionysius, for its clear- 
ness and elevation. 

The Atomistic system was urged by Democritus, who perfected it and raised it to an 
acknowledged position, in opposition to the Anaxagorean (in the sense indicated above, at 
the end of § 24). The relation between Leucippus and Anaxagoras is uncertain, Since 
Democritus is called by Aristotle (Metaph., I. 4) an éraipoc (an intimate companion and 
disciple) of Leucippus, the difference between their ages can hardly have amounted to forty 
years, so that Leucippus must have been younger than Anaxagoras. If Anaxagoras did 
not make himself known by his philosophical productions in early life, it may be that 
Leucippus (who appears to be immediately associated with the doctrine of Parmenides by 
his polemic against it) preceded him in this respect; yet this is not very probable, and can 
by no means be concluded from certain passages of Anaxagoras, in which he combats 
opinions (in particular the hypothesis of empty inter-atomic spaces) that are, it is true, 





THE ATOMISTS: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. 69 


found in the writings of the Atomists, but had already been propounded by earlier philos- 
ophers (especially by Pythagoreans), and had also been, in part, combated by Parmenides 
and Empedocles. In view of this uncertainty respecting Leucippus and of the undoubted 
reference which Democritus constantly makes to Anaxagoras, we place the exposition of 
the Atomistic system immediately after that of the Anaxagorean. Besides, the nature of 
the doctrine of Homceomeriz, which is a sort of qualitative Atomism, places it in the 
middle between the four qualitatively different elements of Empedocles and the reduction 
by Leucippus and Democritus of all apparent qualitative diversity to the merely formal 
diversity of an infinite number of atoms. 

In his account of the principles of the earlier philosophers, in the first book of the 
Metaphysics, Aristotle says (c. 4): ‘‘ Leucippus and his associate, Democritus, assume as 
elements the full (πλῆρες, στερεόν, ναστόν) and the void (κενόν, μανόν). The former they 
term being (ὄν), the latter, non-being (μὴ ὄν): hence they assert, further, that non-being 
exists as well as being.” According to another account (Plutarch., Adv. Col., 4), Democ- 
ritus expressed himself thus: μὴ μᾶλλον τὸ δὲν ἢ τὸ μηδὲν εἰναι ("" Thing is not more real 
than no-thing”), expressing by the singularly constructed word, δὲν, something (“thing”). 
The number of things in being (atoms) is infinitely great. Each of them is indivisible 
(ἄτομον). Between them is empty space. In support of the doctrine of empty space, 
Democritus alleged, according to Aristotle (Phys., IV. 6), the following grounds: 1. Motion 
requires a vacuum; for that which is full can receive nothing else into itself; 2. Rarefac- 
tion and condensation are impossible without the existence of empty intervals of space; 
3. Organic growth depends on the penetration of nutriment into the vacant spaces of 
bodies; 4. The amount of water which can be poured into a vessel filled with ashes, 
although less than the vessel would contain if empty, is not just so much less as the space 
amounts to, which is taken up by the ashes; hence the one must in part enter into the 
vacant interstices of the other. 

The atoms differ (according to Arist. Metaph., I. 4) in the three particulars of shape 
(σχῆμα, called ῥυσμός by the Atomists themselves, according to Aristotle), order (τάξες, or, 
in the language of the Atomists, διαθηγῆ), and position (θέσις, Atomistic tpo77). As an 
example of difference in shape, Aristotle cites the Greek characters A and N, of order or 
sequence AN and NA, and of the difference of position Zand N. As being essentially 
characterized by their shape, Democritus seems to have called the atoms also ἐδέας and 
σχήματα (Arist., Phys., 111.4; Plut., Adv. Col., 8; Hesych., s. v. ἰδέα). These differences are 
sufficient, according to the Atomists, to explain the whole circle of phenomena; are not the 
same letters employed in the composition of a tragedy and a comedy (Arist., De Gen. et Corr., 
I. 2)? The magnitude of the atoms is diverse. The weight of each atom corresponds 
with its magnitude. 

The cause of the atoms is not to be asked after, for they are eternal, and hence uncaused 
(Afist., Phys., VIII. 1, p. 252a, 35: Δημόκριτος τοῦ ἀεὶ οὐκ ἀξιοῖ ἀρχὴν ζητεῖν). (It was 
probably not the Atomists themselves, but later philosophers, who first hypostasized this 
very absence of a cause into a species of cause or efficient nature, τὸ αὐτόματον.) 

“Democritus is said also to have declared the motion of the atoms to be primordial and 
eternal. But with this statement we find united the other, that the weight of the larger 
atoms urged them downward more rapidly than the others, by which means the smaller 
and lighter ones were forced upward, while through their collision with the descending 
atoms lateral movements were also produced. In this way arose a rotatory motion (div), 
which, extending farther and farther, occasioned the formation of worlds. In this process 
homogeneous elements came together (not in consequence of the agency of “love” and 
“hate,” or an all-ruling “ Mind,” but) in obedience to natural necessity, in virtue of which 


70 THE ATOMISTS: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. 


things of like weight and shape must come to the same places, just as we observe in the 
winnowing of grain. Many atoms having become permanently united in the course of their 
revolutions, larger composite bodies and whole worlds came into existence. 

The earth was originally in motion, and continued thus, while it was yet small and 
light; but gradually it came to rest. Organized beings arose from the moist earth. The 
soul consists of fine, smooth, and round atoms, which are also atoms of fire. Such atoms 
lare distributed throughout the whole body, but in particular organs they exercise par- 
ticular functions. The brain is the seat of thought, the heart, of anger, the liver, of desire. 
When we draw in the breath we inhale soul-atoms from the air; in the expiration of 
breath we exhale such atoms into the air, and life lasts as long as this double process is 
continued. 

Sensuous perception is explained by effluxes of atoms from the things perceived, 
whereby images (εἴδωλα) are produced, which strike our senses. Through such εἴδωλα, 
says Democritus, even the gods manifest themselves to us. Perception is not wholly 
veracious; it transforms the impressions received. The atoms are invisible on account 
of their smallness (only excepting, perhaps, those which come from the sun). Atoms and 
vacuity are all that exists in reality; qualitative differences exist only for us, in the 
sensuous phenomenon (Νόμῳ γλυκὺ καὶ νόμῳ πικρόν, νόμῳ θερμόν, νόμῳ ψυχρόν, νόμῳ χροιή * 
ἐτεῇ δὲ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν, Democritus, ap. Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 135). The asser- 
tion of Democritus (ap. Diog. L., IX. 72), that in reality we know nothing, ete. (ἐτεῇ δὲ 
οὐδὲν iduev, ἐν βυϑῷ yap ἡ ἀλήϑεια), must, as employed by him, probably be restricted to 
the case of sensuous phenomena; for in view of the assurance with which Democritus 
professes the doctrine of atoms, this skeptical utterance can not be supposed to bear upon 
that doctrine itself. Democritus (according to Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 138) also 
expressly distinguished from sensuous perception, which he called obscure knowledge 
(σκοτίη), the genuine knowledge (γνησίη) acquired by the understanding through investiga- 
tion. That kind of philosophical thinking by which Democritus went beyond the results of 
sensuous perception and recognized in the atoms the reality of things, was not made by 
him itself a subject of philosophical reflection, and the manner in which such thinking is 
effected was left by him without special explanation; it is among the philosophers of the 
following period (with the earliest among whom Democritus was indeed contemporaneous) 
that reflection concerning the nature of thought itself begins. Yet it follows from the 
fundamental principles of Democritus that thought can not be independent of sensation or 
the νοῦς of the ψυχῆ, and this inference was expressly drawn by Democritus (Cic., De Fin., 
I. 6; Plut., De Pil. Philos., 1V. 8; ef. Arist., De An., III. 3). The only expression which 
Democritus appears to have given to his views concerning the origin of true knowledge, is 
that implied in the principle which he enounced in agreement with Anaxagoras, that we 
should proceed in our inferences from phenomena (φαινόμενα) to the unknown (ἄδηλα, see 
Sext. Empir., Adv. Muth., VII. 140), and in his doctrine that thought arises when the 
motions of the soul are ‘‘ symmetrical” (Theophr., De Sensu, 58). 

The soul is the noblest part of man; he who loves its goods, loves what is most divine. 
He who loves the goods of the body, which is the tent of the soul, loves the merely human. 
The highest good is happiness (εὐεστώ, εὐθυμία, ἀταραξία, ἀθαμβία). This is attained by 
avoiding extremes and observing the limits fixed by nature (μετριότητε τέρψιος καὶ βίου 
ξυμμετρίῃ. Not external goods secure happiness; its seat is the soul (εὐδαιμονίη ψυχῆς 
καὶ κακοδαιμονίη οὐκ ἐν βοσκήμασι οἰκέει avd’ ἐν χρυσῷ, ψυχὴ dé οἰκητήριον δαίμονος) Not 
the act as such, but the will, determines moral character (ἀγαθὸν οὗ τὸ μὴ ἀδικέειν, ἀλλα 
τὸ μηδὲ ἐθέλειν"----.καριστικὸς οὐκ ὁ βλέπων πρὸς τὴν ἀμοιβήν, ἀλλ᾽ ὁ εὖ δρᾷν προῃρημένος). 
The highest satisfaction comes from knowledge (Euseb., Pr. Hv., XIV. 21, 3; Δημρόκειτος 


DIVISIONS OF THE SECOND PERIOD. fi) 


ἔλεγε βούλεσθαι μᾶλλον μίαν εὑρεῖν αἰτιολογίαν, ἢ τὴν Περσῶν οἱ βασιλείαν γενέσθαι). The 
country of the wise and good is the whole world (avdpi σοφῷ πᾶσα γῆ Baty: ψυχῆς γὰρ 
ἀγαθῆς πατρὶς ὁ ξύμπας κόσμορ). 

In the ethical theorems of Democritus, as also in those which relate to the difference 
between objective reality and our subjective apprehension of it, and which belong to the 
theory of cognition, the tendency to overstep the limits of cosmology becomes manifest—a 
tendency not wanting to any of the older philosophers and peculiarly natural in those 
standing on the borders of the first period. Democritus, the contemporary of Socrates, but 
younger than he, went considerably farther in this direction than Anaxagoras or any 
other of the earlier thinkers. 

The first disciples and successors of Democritus (among whom Metrodorus of Chios is 
the most important) seem to have emphasized more strongly and developed to a greater 
extent the skeptical elements, which were contained more particularly in his doctrine 
of sensuous perception. 


Sxconp (Prevaminety ANTHROPOLOGICAL) ΡΈΒΙΟΡ or GREEK 
PuHILosopxHy. 


FROM THE SOPHISTS TO THE STOICS, EPICUREANS, AND 
SKEPTICS. 


§ 26. To the Second Period of Greek Philosophy belong, 1) the 
Sophists, 2) Socrates, the imperfect disciples of Socrates, Plato, and 
Aristotle, 3) the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. The Sophists, as 
speculators, regard mainly the phenomena of perception, represen- 
tation, and desire. Socrates considers principally the phenomena 
‘and laws of logical thinking and moral willing, and thus recognizes 
the essential relation of man, the thinking subject, to the objective 

_world; the more precise investigation of this relation is undertaken 
by Plato and Aristotle, who also redirect attention to physical phi- 
losophy, and who (as regards their political and ethical doctrines) 
regard man as essentially a social being, or the individual as an essen- 
tial and a natural part of the body politic. The Stoics and Epicu- 
reans, while indeed laying more stress upon the independence of the 
individual, leave him nevertheless subject to norms of thought and 
will having universal validity. Finally, Skepticism, which likewise 
seeks its end in the satisfaction of the needs of the individual subject, 
prepares the way for a new period, through the dissolution of all 
existing systems. 





72 GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE SOPHISTIC DOCTRINES. 


The ethical and religious utterances of the poets, historians, etc., of this period contain philosophical 
matter, but not in philosophical form, and the exposition of them must be left to the historians of literature 
and of human culture in its more general development. 


In this period Athens became the center of Hellenic culture and, especially, of Hellenic 
philosophy. Pericles (in Thucyd., II. 41) describes Athens as a school of civilization for 
Greece. In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras (p. 337 d), the Sophist, Hippias of Elis, terms 
Athens ‘‘the Prytaneum of the wisdom of Hellas.” Isocrates says (Panegyr., 50): ‘the 
Athenian state has caused the name Hellenes to become suggestive rather of intellectual 
culture than of historical descent.” The susceptibility of the Athenians for art and 
science, their disposition for philosophical reflection, and the consequent establishment of 
the philosophical schools at Athens, are the most important circumstances in the historic 
connections of the second period of Greek philosophy. 


δ 27. In the doctrine of the Sophists the transition was effected 
from philosophy as cosmology,to philosophy as concerning itself with 
the thinking and willing subject. Yet the reflection of the Sophists 
extended only to the recognition of the subject in his immediate 
individual character, and was incompetent, therefore, to establish on 
a scientific basis the theory of cognition and science of morals, for 
which it prepared the way. The chief representatives of this ten- 
dency were Protagoras the Individualist, Gorgias the Nihilist, Hippias 
the Polymathist, and Prodicus the Moralist. These men were followed 
by a younger generation of Sophists, who perverted the philosophi- 
cal principle of subjectivism more and more, till it ended in mere 
frivolity. 


On the Sophists, compare—in addition to the several chapters which treat of them in the above- 
cited works of Hegel, Brandis, Zeller, and others, and in Grote’s History of Greece (VIII. pp. 474-544), and 
K. F. Hermann’s Gesch. u. Syst. der Platon. Philosophie (pp. 179 seq. and 296 seq.)—in particular, the 
following works: Jac. Geel, Historia critica sophistarum, qui Socratis aetate Athenis jloruerunt, in the 
Nova acta litt. societ. Rheno- Trajectinae, p. IL., Utr. 1823; Herm, Roller, Die griechischen Sophisten zu 
Sokrates und Plato's Zeit und ihr Einjiuss auf Beredtsamkeit und Philosophie, Stuttg. 1882; W. G. 
Ἐς Roscher, De historicae doctrinae apud sophistas majores vestigiis, Gott. 1888; W. Baumhauer, 
Quam vim sophistae habuerint Athenis ad aetatis suae disciplinam, meres ae studia immutanda, 
Utrecht, 1844; H. Schildener, Die Sophisten, in Jahn'’s Archiv fiir Philol., Vol. XVIIL., p. 885 seq. 
1851; Joh. Frei, Beitrdge zur Geschichte der griechischen Sophistik. in the Rhein. Mus. f. Ph.. new 
series, VII. 1850, pp. 527-554, and VIII. 1853, pp. 268-279; A. J. Vitringa, De sophistarum scholis, quae 
Socratis aetate Athenis floruerunt, in: Mnemosyne, 11. 1853, pp. 223-237; Valat, Hssai historique sur 
les sophistes grecs, in L' Investigateur, Paris, 1859, Sept., pp. 257-267, Nov., pp. 321-336, Dee., pp. 853-361 ; 
Theod. Gomperz, Die gricch. Sophisten, in the Deutsche Jahrb., Vol. VIL., Berl. 1863; N, Wecklein, Die 
Sophisten und die Sophistik nach den Angaben Plato's, Wirzburg, 1865; Martin Schanz, Beitrdge zur 
vorsokratischen Philosophie aus Plato, 1. Heft: Die Sophisten, Gottingen, 1867; Mullach, Fragmenta 
Ph. Graec., Τ1.. 1867, p. ΤΎ ΤΠ]. seq., and “ Sophistarum Fragm.,” ibid. p. 180 seq. ; H. Siebeck, Das Problem 
des Wissens bei Sokrates und der Sophistik, Halle, 1870. 


The Sophists are historically of importance not only as rhetoricians, grammarians, and 
diffusers of various forms of positive knowledge, but also (as, in particular, Hegel has 
shown) as representatives of a relatively legitimate philosophical stand-point. Their philo- 
sophical reflection centered in man, was subjective rather than objective in direction, and 
thus prepared the way for ethics and logic. That the Sophists should turn their attention 


a 


ἀν» τ" » 


- 


PROTAGORAS OF ABDERA. i3 


primarily to the natural basis and condition of thought and will alone, 7. ¢., to perception 
and opinion, to sensuous pleasure and individual desire and will, was natural and neces- 
sary; their error consisted in treating this natural basis, beyond which their reflective obser- 
vation did not extend, as comprehending all the subjective powers and data, and in ignoring 
or misapprehending the higher. It is none theless tite that the doctrine of the Sophists 
marks a progress in philosophical thought. The sensualistic subjectivism of Protagoras is 
in one respect superior to the philosophical thinking of Parmenides; for the latter is only 
concerned with being in general, not (or at least only incidentally) with perception and 
thought themselves. The sensualism of the Sophists is not itself sensuous perception, 
but, essentially, reflective thinking concerning perception and opinion, and consequently 
the next step to that speculation concerning thought as such, which was instituted by 
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Without those ‘‘Sophists,” these ‘ philosophers” could 
not have become what they did become. In considering the judgments expressed by 
Plato and Aristotle concerning the doctrine of the Sophists, not orly should the great 
difference be borne in mind between the earlier and later generations of Sophists, but also 
the nature of the standard by which these philosophers judged them. Measured by the 
ideal principles of Plato, the thinking and the character of the Sophists appear reprehern- 
sible; but they were not opposed in principle to the opinions and practices of the times 
(the Sophists, as Plat., Rep., 493, says, taught τὰ τῶν πολλῶν δόγματα), although many 
of the Sophists disputed in certain respects the authority of tradition. The Sophists, 
who cultivated chiefly rhetoric and much more rarely the pseudo-dialectical science of dis- 
pute (‘‘Eristic”), only prepared the way for the dialectical destruction of naive, traditional 
convictions. It was (as Grote correctly remarks) Socrates and his pupils, who first com- 
pleted this work of destruction and at the same time undertook to furnish a positive 
substitute for what was destroyed. 

If the teaching of the Sophists were only criticism, and had only accomplished the sub- 
version of cosmological philosophy, we should be obliged to include it (as Zeller and others 
do) in the first period. But since it is essentially characterized by reflection on certain 
phases of subjective life, it belongs unquestionably to the second period, Even Zeller, 
who places it in the first, admits (Ph. d. Gr., II. 1, 2d ed. p. 129; ef. also I. p. 725) that 
“the Sophists first conducted philosophy from objective investigation to ethics and dia- 
lectic, and transferred thought to subjective ground.” 

The essential point in which the Sophists were innovators was this: that they intro- 
duced a new kind of instruction, not in any special department, as music or gymnastics, 
but with a view to the development of a certain universality of culture, a culture which 
should embrace all the interests of life and which, in particular, should provide the 
recipients of it with political intelligence; that, further, this instruction was founded on 
speculations concerning the nature of human volition and thought, and that by it, rather 
than by tradition or common opinion, they caused the views and practices of the citizens 
to be determined. This new branch of instruction was by no means given up by Socrates 
and his disciples; it was only expanded and developed by them in another and more pro- 
found manner, so that, with all their opposition to the Sophists, they nevertheless stand 
- witn them on the common ground of subjective philosophical speculation (cf. Plutarch’s 
Life of Themistocles, chap. 2). 


§ 28. Protagoras of Abdera (born about 490), who figured as 
teacher of rhetoric in numerous Greek cities, especially at Athens, 
and was a contemporary of Socrates, although considerably older than 


74 PROTAGORAS OF ABDERA. 


he, transferred and applied the doctrine of Heraclitus respecting the 
eternal flux of all things to the knowing subject, and asserted: Man 
is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things 
that are not, that they are not. Just as each thing appears to each 
man, so is it for him. All truth is relative. The existence of the 
gods is uncertain. 


On Protagoras alone, ef. Geist, De Protagora Sophista, Giessen, 1827; Leonh. Spengel, De Protagora 
rhetore ejusque scriptis, in his Συναγωγὴ τεχνῶν, Stuttg. 1828, p. 52 seq.; Ludw. Ferd. Herbst, Protagoras’ 
Leben und Sophistik aus den Quellen zusammengestellt, in Philol.-hist. Studien, ed. by Petersen, 1st 
part, Hamb. 1832, p. 88 seq.; Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 1380-142; Joh. Frei, Quaestiones Protagoreae, 
Bonn, 1845; O. Weber, Quaestiones Protagoreae, Marburg, 1850; Jak. Bernays, Die KataBaddovtes dee 
Protagoras, in the Rhein. Mus. 7. Phil., N. 8., VII. 1850, pp. 464-468; A. J. Vitringa, De Protagorae vita 
et philosophia, Groningen, 1853; Friedr. Blass, Die att. Beredsamkeit, Leipsic, 1868, pp. 28-29. Cf. the 
works cited, ad 8 21. 


Plato states (Protag., 317 c, seq.) that Protagoras was considerably older than Socrates. 
According to a statement in the Platonic dialogue Meno (p. 91 6), from which the similar 
statement of Apollodorus (ap. Diog. L., IX. 56) seems to have been copied, he lived about 
seventy years; according to another version (ap. Diog. L., IX. 55), he lived more than 
ninety years. Probably he was born ca. 491, and died ca, 421-415 B. c. He called himself 
a σοφιστής, 1. e., a teacher of wisdom (Plat., Protag., p. 316d: ὁμολογῶ τε σοφιστὴς εἶναι καὶ 
παιδεύειν ἀνθρώπους). The word Sophist acquired its signification as a term of reproach 
especially through Aristophanes and afterward through the followers of Socrates, par- 
ticularly Plato and Aristotle, who contrasted themselves, as “philosophers,” with the 
“Sophists.” Sophists like Protagoras stood in high consideration with the majority of 
cultivated people, as Plato’s dialogue Protag. especially attests, although a respectable and 
well-to-do Athenian burgher could not himself have been a Sophist (man of letters), and 
earned money by public lessons. It is well known that at a later time rhetoricians were 
also called Sophists. Protagoras is said to have prepared the laws for the Athenian 
colony of Thurii (Heraclides, ap. Diog. L., 1X. 50). He was first at Athens between 451 
and 445 8. c. (see Frei), next perhaps about 432, and again Ol. 88.3 = 422-421 B. ¢., and 
shortly before his death. It is probable that Plato in his dialogue Protagoras has with 
poetic license transferred single circumstances from 422 to 432. On the occasion of his 
last sojourn at Athens (about 415? or 411?) he was accused and condemned as an atheist. 
The copies of his work were demanded of their private owners, and burned in the market- 
place; he himself perished at sea on his passage to Sicily. The supposition of Epicurus, 
that he had been a pupil of Democritus (Diog. L., IX. 53; X. 8), is hardly consistent with 
the relation between their ages, and is improbable on other grounds. On the other hand, 
it is even affirmed that Democritus mentioned and opposed Protagoras in his writings 
(Diog. L., IX. 42; Plutarch., Adv. Coloten, IV. 2). 

In the doctrine of Protagoras Plato finds the inevitable consequence of the doctrine of 
Heraclitus (Theaet., p. 152 seq.). He admits its validity with reference to sensuous percep- 
tion (αἱσθησις), but objects to any extension of it beyond this province as an illegitimate 
generalization of the theory of relativity. (For the rest, there is contained in the proposi- 
tion, that all that is true, beautiful, and good, is such only for the knowing, feeling, and 
willing subject, a permanent truth. This truth Protagoras only one-sidedly exaggerated 
by ignoring the objective factor.) 

According to Diog. L., IX. 51, the original words of the fundamental theorem of Pro- 
tagoras (‘‘Man the measure of all things”) were as follows: πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον 





§ 
J 


PROTAGORAS OF ABDERA. 75 


ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστι, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν. It remains uncertain how 
far the manner in which Protagoras established this proposition agreed with that which 
we find reported in Plato’s Pheaetetus (p. 152 seq.). Diog. L. says of Protagoras that ‘“ he 
first showed how theses might be defended and attacked,” and “he first said that on every 
subject contradictory affirmations could be maintained.” It is to the equivocal pseudo- 
dialectical mode of discussion which is implied in these quotations, and which Protagoras 
seems to have followed in his work ᾿Αντιλογικά, that Plato alludes in terms of censure in 
Phaedo, p. 101 d,e. Aristotle says (Metaph., 111. 2, 32, p. 998 a, 4): ὥσπερ Πρωταγόρας 
ἔλεγεν ἐλέγχων τοὺς γεωμέτρας, οὐδ᾽ ai κινήσεις Kai EALKEG TOV οὐρανοῦ ὅμοιαι, περὶ ὧν ἡ ἀστρο- 
λογία ποιεῖται τοὺς λόγους͵ οὗτε τὰ σημεῖα τοῖς ἄστροις τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχει φύσιν, from which it 
appears that Protagoras sought to meet the objection urged against his sensualistic sub- 
jectivism on the ground of the universal validity of geometrical propositions independently 
of individual opinion, by retorting that, in the sphere of objective reality, simple points, 
straight lines, and geometrical curves nowhere exist. In this he confounded with mere 
subjective experience, abstraction when employed as a means of confining the attention to 
special phases of objective reality. 

In illustration of the fundamental idea of Protagoras, a kindred utterance of Goethe 
may be compared, which will illustrate as well the relative truth of that idea, as the one- 
sidedness of disallowing an objective norm. ‘I have observed that I hold that thought to 
be true which is fruitful for me, which adjusts itself to the general direction of my thought, 
and at the same time furthers me in it. Now, it is not only possible, but natural, that 
such a thought should not chime in with the sense of another person, nor further him, 
perhaps even be a hinderanve to him, and so he will hold it to be false; when one is right 
thoroughly convinced of this he will never indulge in controversy” (Goethe-Zelterscher 
Briefwechsel, V.354). Compare further the following in Goethe’s Maximen und Rejflexionen : 
“When 1 know my relation to myself and to the outer world, I say that I possess the 
truth. And thus each may have his own truth, and yet truth is ever the same.” 

Protagoras won for himself considerable scientific distinction by his philological investi- 
gations. He treated of the right use of words (ὀρθοέπεια, Plat., Phaedr., 267 c), and he first 
distinguished the different forms of the sentence which correspond with the moods of the 
verb (Diog. L., IX. 53: διεῖλε δὲ τὸν λόγον πρῶτος εἰς τέτταρα" εὑχωλήν, ἐρώτησιν, ἀπόκρισιν, 
ἐντολήν). (But the use of the imperative in such passages as Jliad, I. 1: Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, 
where not a command, but a request, was to be expressed, threw him into a perplexity, 
from which he could only rescue himself by censuring the Homeric form of expression; v. 
Arist., Poet., c. 19, p. 1456 b, 15). Protagoras also distinguished the genders of nouns. 
Those who would perfect themselves in the art of discourse were required by him to 
combine practice with theory (Stob., Floril., XXIX. 80: Πρωταγόρας ἔλεγε μηδὲν εἷναι μῆτε 
τέχνην ἄνευ μελέτης μήτε μελέτην ἄνευ τέχνης). 

A ease, which would otherwise be lost, may be made victorious by the rhetorical art 
(τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν, Arist., Rhet., II. 24; Gell., Ν' A., V.3). This utterance of 
Protagoras does not imply that the “‘ weaker” side must necessarily be known to be unjust 
(as Aristophanes presupposes, who falsely attributes the doctrine to Socrates, Nub., 113). 
Still, to the prejudice of the moral character of the art of rhetoric, the difference is left 
unnoticed which subsists between cases where just arguments, which would otherwise 
remain unremarked, are brought to light, and cases in which the unjust is clothed with 
the appearance of justice; the Protagorean principle of the identity of appearance and 
reality rendered such a distinction impossible. 

The sentence: πάντων γρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος formed, according to Sextus 
Kmpiricus, Adv. Math., VIL. 560, the beginning of the work entitled Καταβάλλοντες (se. 


76 GORGIAS OF LEONTINI. 


λόγο). With the same sentence began also, according to Plat., Theaet., Ὁ. 16] ο, the 
Αλήθεια. No work bearing either of these titles is mentioned by Diogenes Laértius in his 
list of the works of Protagoras (D. L., 1X. 55). We must, therefore, either assume with 
Bernays (Rhein. Mus., new series, VII. p. 467), that the ᾿Αντιλογίαι mentioned by Diogenes 
were identical with the Καταβάλλοντες or the ᾿Αλήθεια, or perhaps regard ’AvriAoyia: or 
Καταβάλλοντες as having constituted the general title, while ᾿Αλήθεια was the special name 
given to the first book. According to the exaggerated and undoubtedly calumniatory 
expression of the Aristotelian, Aristoxenus—whom Phavorinus followed (cited by Diog. L., 
III. 37 and 57)—Plato drew nearly all the positions of his theory of the ideal state from 
the ᾿Αντιλογικὰ (᾿Αντιλογίαι) of Protagoras. This, while perhaps true of single positions, 
can not be true of the theory as a whole, owing to the difference of the fundamental 
principles assumed by Protagoras and Plato. Whether the myth, which Plato puts into 
the mouth of Protagoras, in the dialogue of the same name (p. 320 ¢, seq.), really belongs 
to him, is uncertain, though not improbable. 

Of the gods, Protagoras (according to Diog. L., 1X. 51) affirmed that he did not know 
whether they existed or not; for many things hindered this knowledge, such as the 
obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life. 


§ 29. Gorgias of Leontini (in Sicily), who came to Athens as embas- 
sador from his native city in the year 427 8. c., was an elder contem- 
porary of Socrates, whom he outlived. He taught chiefly the art of 
rhetoric. In philosophy he held a doctrine of nihilism, expressed 
in these three propositions: 1) Nothing exists; 2) If any thing ex- 
isted, it would be unknowable; 3) If any thing existed and were | 
knowable, the knowledge of it could nevertheless not be communi- 
cated to others. | 


The following works treat specially of Gorgias: H. Ed. Foss, De Gorgia Leontino commentatio, inter- 
positus est Aristotelis de Gorgia liber emendatius editus, Halle, 1828; Leonh. Spengel, De Gorgia rhetore, 
1828, in “ Συναγωγὴ τεχνῶν," Stuttg. 1828; Oratores Attici, ed. J. Ε΄. Baiterus et Herm. Sauppius, fase. VIT., 
Zurich, 1845, p. 129 seq.; Frei, Beitr. zur Gesch. der griech. Sophistik, in the Rhein, Mus., VIL. 1850, p. 
527 seq. and VIIL., 268 seq. ; Franz Susemihl, Ueber das Verhaltmiss des Gorgias sum Empedokles, in the 
N, Jahrb. fiir Ph., 1856, pp. 40-42, A. Baumstark, Gorgias von Leontium, in the Rhein. Mus. 7. Philol., 
XV. 1860, pp. 624-626; Franz Kern, Kritische Bemerkungen zum 8. Theil der pseudo- Aristotelischen 
Schrift π. Bev., 7. Znv., 7. Vopyiov, Oldenburg, 1869; Fried. Blass, Die att. Bereds. von Gorg. bis eu Lysias, 
Leipsic, 1868, pp. 44-72. 


That Gorgias, in Ol. 88.2 (in the summer of the year 427 B. ¢.), at the head of a Leon- 
tine embassy, sought to persuade the Athenians to send help against the Syracusans, is 
related by Diodorus (XII. 53; cf. Thucyd., IIT. 86). Plato compares him (Phaedr., p. 261) 
to Nestor, on account of his oratorical talent, and having reference also, as is probable, to 
his great age. The approximate dates of his birth and death may (according to Frei) be 
assumed as respectively 483 and 375 B.c. According to the account given in Athenzeus, 
ΧΙ. 505 ἃ, he was still living when the Platonic dialogue Gorgias was written, and termed 
the author of it an Archilocus redivivus. He appears to have passed the last part of his life 
at Larissa, in Thessaly. 

According to the Platonic dialogue Meno (p. 76 c) Gorgias agreed with Empedocles in 
the doctrine of effluxes from perceived objects and of pores; and appears to have been in 
general, a. disciple of Empedocles in natural philosophy. Corax and perhaps also Tisias 
were bis predecessors and patterns in rhetoric; the rhetorical manner of Empedocles 


HIPPIAS OF ELIS. T7 


appears also to have exercised a powerful influence on him. Gorgias described rhetoric 
as the worker of conviction (πειθοῦς δημιουργός). He is said to have termed tragedy a salu- 
tary deception (Plut., De Gloria Atheniensium, cap.5; cf. De Aud. Poét.,c.1: Γοργίας δὲ τὴν 
τραγῳδίαν εἶπεν aratyy, ἣν 6 τε ἀπατήσας δικαιότερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατήσαντος καὶ ὁ ἀπατηθείς 
σοφώτερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατηθέντος). In his philosophical argumentations Gorgias made use of 
the contradictory propositions of the earlier philosophers, yet in such a manner as to de- 
grade their earnest tendency into a rhetorical word-play. 

In his Gorgias (p. 462 seq.) Plato defines sophistry (σοφιστικὴ, in the narrower sense of 
the term, and apparently with special reference to the political and ethical doctrine of Pro- 
tagoras) as a corruption of the art of legislation, and rhevoric (as taught especially by 
Gorgias and his successors) as a corruption of justice (considered here in a narrower sense 
than in the Rep., namely, as denoting retribution and reward, avtizerovféc); the charac- 
teristic feature in each being flattery (κολακεία) ; these corruptions, he affirms, are not arts, 
but simply forms of quackery. Plato parallelizes the two arts named, which are included 
by him under the one name of politics, and their corruptions, as having reference all of them 
to the soul, with an equal number of “businesses” (ἐπιτηδεύσεις), which have reference 
to the body, namely, the art of legislation with gymnastics, justice with the healing art, 
sophistry with the art of adornment, and rhetoric with the art of cookery. But in these 
depreciatory definitions and comparisons he refers less to the doctrines of Gorgias than to 
the practice of some of his successors, who were less scrupulous than Gorgias himself, 
about ignoring the dependence of true rhetoric on the knowledge of what is truly good 
and just, and who abandoned themselves exclusively to the chase after “joy and 
pleasure.” 

The main contents of the work of Gorgias, epi τοῦ μὴ ὄντος ἢ περὶ φύσεως, are found in 
Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 65 seq., and in the last chapters of the treatise, De Melisso, 
Aenophane (or Zenone) et Gorgia. 1) Nothing is; for if any thing were, its being must be 
either derived or eternal; but it can not have been derived, whether from the existent or 
from the non-existent (according to the Eleatics); nor can it be eternal, for then it must be 
infinite; but the infinite is nowhere, since it can neither be in itself nor in any thing else, and 
what is nowhere, is not. 2) If any thing were, it could not be known; for if knowledge 
of the existent were possible, then all that is thought must be, and the non-existing could not 
even be thought of; but then error would be impossible, even though one should affirm 
that a contest with chariots took place on the sea, which is absurd. 3) If knowledge were 
possible, yet it could not be communicated; for every sign differs from the thing it signifies ; 
how can any one communicate by words the notion of color, seeing that the ear hears 
not colors, but sounds? And how can the same idea be in two persons, who are yet dif- 
ferent from one another ? 

In a certain sense every opinion is, according to Protagoras, true; according to Gorgias, 
false. But each of these positions leads equally to the negation of objective truth, and 
implies the complete substitution of mere persuasion for conviction. 


§ 30. Hippias of Elis, one of the younger contemporaries of Pro- 
tagoras, and distinguished more for rhetorical talent and for his 
mathematical, astronomical, and archeological acquisitions, than for 
his philosophical doctrines, exhibits the ethical stand-point of the 
Sophistic philosophy in the position ascribed to him by Plato, that 
the law is the tyrant of men, since it forces them to do many things 
contrary to nature. 


78 PRODICUS OF CEOS. 


On Hippias, ef. Leonh. Spengel, De Hippia Eleo ejusque scriptis, in “ Συναγωγὴ τεχνῶν," Stuttg. 1828; 
Osann, Der Sophist Hippias ais Archdolog, Rhein. Mus., N.8., 11. 1848, p. 495 seq.; C. Miller, Hipp. 
Elei fragmenta coll., in Fragmenta historic. Graec., Vol. II., Paris, 1848; Jac. Mahly, Der Sophist ἢ. 
o. E., Rh, Mus., N.8., XV. 1860, pp. 514-535, and XVI. 1861, pp. 38-49; F. Blass, Die att. Bereds., Leips., 
1868, pp. 81-83, 


In the congress of Sophists which Plato represents in his dialogue Protagoras as being 
held in the house of Callias, shortly before the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, Hippias 
appears as a man in middle life, considerably younger than Protagoras. According to 
Prot., p. 318, he gave instruction in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Cf. also 
Pseudo-Plat., Hippias Major, p. 285 ¢. 

In Prot., p. 387 ¢, Plato puts into the mouth of Hippias the doctrine above enunciated: 
ὁ δὲ νόμος, τύραννος ὧν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, πολλὰ Tapa THY φύσιν βιάζεται. He finds it contrary 
to nature that differences of country and laws should estrange from each other men of 
education, who are united by a natural kinship (φύσει συγγενεῖς). In Xenophon (Memor., 
IV. 4) he contends against the duty of respecting the laws by urging their diversity and 
instability. Yet in his ethical deliverances Hippias seems as little as other Sophists 
to have placed himself in conscious and radical antagonism to the spirit of the Grecian 
people; monitions and rules of life like those which in the dialogue, Hippias Major (p. 
286 a), he represents Nestor as giving to Neoptolemus, may have been uttered by him 
with a fair degree of good faith. 


§ 31. Prodicus of Ceos, by his parenetical discourses on moral 
subjects (among which “ Hercules at the Cross-roads ” is the one best 
known) and by his distinctions of words of similar signification, pre- 
pared the way for the ethical and logical efforts of Socrates. Yet he 
did not go materially beyond the stand-point of the older Sophists. 


Cf. on Prodicus, L. Spengel, De Prodico Ceo, in “ Svvaywyn τεχνῶν," p. 46 seq. ; F. ΘΟ. Welcker, Prodikos, 
der Vorgdnger des Sokrates, in the Rhein. Mus. f. Ph., 1. 1838, pp. 1-89 and 533-643 (cf. [V. 1836, p. 855 
seq.), and in Welcker’s KZ, Schr., 11. pp. 398-541: Hummel, De Prodico sophista, Leyden, 1847 ; E. Cougny, 
De Prodico Ceio, Socratis magistro, Paris, 1858; Diemer, De Prod. Ceio(@.-Pr.), Corbach, 1859; Kraemer, 
Die Allegorie des Prodikos und der Traum des Lukianos, in the N. Jahrb. f. Ph. und Péd., vol. 94, 
1866, pp. 489-448; F. Blass, Die azz, Bereds., Leipsic, 1868, pp. 29-31. 


Prodicus appears from Plato’s Protagoras to have been younger than Protagoras, and 
of about the same age with Hippias. Socrates recommended his instruction in many 
instances to young men, though, indeed, only to such as he found ill-adapted for dia- 
lectical training (Plat., Theaet., 151b), and he sometimes terms himself (Plat., Protag., 
341 a; cf. Charm., 163d, Crat., 384b, Meno, 96d), a pupil of Prodicus, though more 
sportively than seriously. Plato pictures him in the Protag. as effeminate, and as, in his 
distinctions of words, somewhat pedantic. Yet his most considerable philosophical merit 
is founded on his investigations of synonyms. 

The men of the earliest times, said Prodicus, deified whatever was useful to them, and 
so bread was venerated as Demeter, wine as Dionysus, fire as Hephaestus, ete. (Cic., De 
Nat. Deorum, I. 42,118; Sextus Empir., Adv. Math., LX. 18, 51 seq.). 

Xenophon (Memor. 11. 1. 21 seq.) has imitated the myth of Prodicus concerning the 
choice of Hercules between virtue and pleasure. Prodicus declared death to be desirable 
as an escape from the evils of life. His moral consciousness lacked philosophical basis 


and depth. 


OTHER SOPHISTS. 79 


§ 32. Of the Later Sophists, in whom the evil consequences of 
granting exclusive recognition to the accidental opinion and ego- 
tistic will of the individual became more and more conspicuous, 
the best-known are Polus the rhetorician, a pupil of Gorgias; 
Thrasymachus, who identified right with the personal interest of 
those who have might, and the pseudo-dialectical jugglers Euthy- 
demus and Dionysodorus. Many of the most cultivated men at 
Athens and in other Greek cities (as, notably, Critias, who stood at 
the head of the thirty oligarchical despots), favored Sophistic prin- 
ciples, though not themselves assuming the functions of Sophists., 
i. é., of instructors in eloquence and polite learning. 


On the later Sophists, see Leonh. Spengel, De Polo rhetore, in his "" Συναγωγὴ τεχνῶν," Stuttg. 1528, pp. 
84-88; Id. de Thrasymacho rhetore, ibid., pp. 93-98; C. F. Hermann, De Thrasymacho Chalcedonio 
sophista (Ind. lect.), Gottingen, 1848-49; Nic. Bach, Critiae Atheniensis tyranni carminwm aliorumqué 
ingenii monumentorum quae supersunt, Leips. 1827; Leonh. Spengel, De Critia, in “ Svvaywyn τεχνῶν." 
Stuttg. 1828, p.120seq. Cf. also Vahlen, Der Sophist Lykophron, Gorgias ; der Rhetor Polykrates, in the 
Rhein Mus., N.8., XXI., pp. 143-148. 


Our information concerning the later Sophists is derived mainly from the descriptions 
of them given by Plato in his dialogues. Polus figures in the Gorgias, Thrasymachus in 
the Republic, and Euthydemus and Dionysodorus in the Huthydemus. To these sources 
must be added a few notices in Aristotle and others, 6. g., Polit. III. 10, p. 1280 Ὁ, 10, 
where it is mentioned that the Sophist Lycophron called the law ἐγγυητὴς τῶν δικαίων. Yet 
in respect to some of the more important Sophists, still other accounts and even fragments 
of their writings have been preserved to us. 

Critias declared (according to Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., IX. 54; ef. Plat., Leges, X., 889 6) 
that the belief in the existence of gods was the invention of a wise statesman, who, by 
thus disguising truth in falsehood, aimed at securing a more willing obedience on the part 
of the citizens (διδαγμάτων ἄριστον εἰσηγήσατο, ψευδεῖ καλύψας τὴν ἀλήθειαν λόγῳ). Critias 
regarded the blood as the seat and substratum of the soul (Arist., De Anima, I. 2). 

According to the account given by Plato in the Protag. (p. 514 ο, seq.), some of those 
who composed the circle of educated Athenians who met in the house of Callias, adhered 
particularly to Protagoras (such as Callias himself, Charmides, and others), others to Hip- 
pias (viz.: Eryximachus, Phaedrus. and others), and still others to Prodicus (Pausanias, 
Agathon, etc.), although they could not be regarded as, properly speaking, the disciples of 
those Sophists, or as standing exclusively under their influence. 

The Sophist Antiphon (apparently to be distinguished from Antiphon the orator) occupiea 
himself with problems connected with the theory of cognition (περὶ ἀληθείας), with math- 
ematics, astronomy, and meteorology, and with politics (see Arist., De Soph. El, c. 11, p. 
172 a, 2; Phys., 1. 1, p. 186 8, 17; Sauppe, in the Oratores Attict, on the orator Antiphon: 
J. Bernays, in the Rhein. Mus., new series, IX. 255 seq.). Hippodamus of Miletus, the 
architect, and Phaleas, the Chalcedonian, also propounded political theories ; see above, § 16. 

Evenus of Paros, a contemporary of Socrates, is mentioned by Plato (Apol., 20a; Phaedr., 
2601 4; Phaedo, 60d) as a poet, rhetorician, and teacher of ‘human and political virtue.” 
Cf. Spengel, Συναγ. τεχνῶν, 92 seq.; Bergk, Lyr. Gr., 474 seq. 

To the time and school of the Sophists belongs Xeniades of Corinth, whom Sextus 
Empiricus (Hypotyp. Pyrrhon., II. 18; Adv. Math., VI. 48 and 53; VIII. 5) classes as a 


80 SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 


Skeptic, representing that (in his skepticism) he agreed with Xenophanes the Eleatie. 
Xeniades affirmed (according to Sext., Adv. Math., VII. 53) that all was deception, every 
idea and opinion was false (πάντ᾽ εἶναι ψευδῆ, καὶ πᾶσαν φαντασίαν Kai δόξαν ψεύδεσθαι), and 
that whatever came into being, came forth from nothing, and whatever perished, passed 
into nothing. Sextus affirms (Adv. M, VII. 53) that Democritus referred to Xeniades in his 
works. 

The dithyrambic poet, Diagoras of Melos, must not be included among the Sophists. 
Of Diagoras it was said that he became an atheist because he saw that a crying injustice 
remained unpunished by the gods. Since Aristophanes alludes to the sentencing of 
Diagoras,—in the ὁ Birds” (v. 1073), which piece was represented on the stage in Olymp. 
91.2,—we are led easily to the inference that the ‘injustice ” referred to was the slaughter 
of the Melians by the Athenians (in 416 B. c.; see Thucyd., V. 116); the allusion of Aris- 
tophanes in the “Clouds” (v. 380) to the atheism of the Melian must, therefore, have been 
inserted in a second, revised edition of this comedy. Perhaps the prosecutions of religious 
offenders, which took place after the desecration of the images of Hermes, in the year 415, 
had some influence in bringing about the punishment of Diagoras. Diagoras is said to 
have perished by shipwreck, while attempting to escape. 


§ 33. Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, was born 
in Olymp. 77.1-3,—according to later tradition, on the 6th day of 
the month Thargelion (hence in 471-469 8. c., in May or June). He 
agreed with the Sophists in the general tendency to make man the 
special object of reflection and study. He differed from them by 
directing his attention not merely to the elementary functions of man 
as a logical and moral subject, viz., to perception, opinion, and sen- 
suous and egotistical desire, but also to the highest intellectual 
functions which stand in essential relation to the sphere of objective 
reality, namely, to knowledge and virtue. Socrates made all virtue 
dependent on knowledge, ἐ, ¢., on moral insight; regarding the former 
as flowing necessarily from the latter. Virtue, according to Socrates, 
could be taught, and all virtue was one. Aristotle (whose testimony 
is confirmed by Plato and Xenophon) testifies that Socrates first 
introduced induction and definition, together with the dialectical 
art of refuting false knowledge, as instruments of philosophical in- 
quiry. The foundation of the Socratic Maceutic and Lrony was 
dexterity in the employment of the methods of inductive definition 
in conversations relative to philosophical and, in particular, to moral 
problems, in the absence of systematically developed, substantive 
knowledge. The “demonic sign,” which was accepted by Socrates as 
the voice of God, was a conviction, resulting from practical tact, with 
reference to the suitableness or unsuitableness of given courses of 
action (including also their ethical relations). The world is governed 
by a supreme, divine intelligence. 


SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 81 


The accusation of Socrates, which took place in the year 399 5. o. 
(Ol. 95.1), not long after the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants, and 
which was brought forward by Meletus, and supported by Anytus, the 
democratic politician, and Lycon, the orator, contained substantially 
the same charges which Aristophanes had made in the * Clouds.” 
It ran thus: ‘Socrates is a public offender in that he does not rec- 
ognize the gods which the state recognizes, but introduces new demo- 
niacal beings; he has also offended by corrupting the youth.” This 
accusation was literally false; but, considered with reference to its 
more profound basis, it rested on the correct assumption of an essen- 
tial relationship between Socrates and the Sophists, as evidenced in 
their common tendency to emancipate the individual, and in their 
common opposition to an immediate, unreflecting submission to the 
customs, law, and faith of the people and the state. But it mistook, 
on the one hand, what was legitimate in this tendency in general ; 
and, on the other,—and this is the principal point,—it ignored the 
specific difference between the Socratic and Sophistic stand-points, or 
the earnest desire and endeavor of Socrates, in distinction from the 
Sophists, to place truth and morality on a new and deeper foun- 
dation. 

After his condemnation, Socrates submitted his conduct, but not 
his convictions, to the decision of his judges. His death, justly 
immortalized by his disciples, assured to his ideal tendency the most 
general and lasting influence. 


Dan. Heinsius, De doctrina et moribus Socratis, Leyden, 1627. 

Fréret, Observations sur les causes et sur quelques circonstances de la condemnation de Socrate, an 
essay read in the year 1736, and published in the Mémoires de Γ᾿ Académie des Inscriptions, T. 47 Ὁ, 209 seq. 
(Combats the old uncritical view of the Sophists as instigators of the accusation and sentence of Socrates, 
and points out the political causes of these transactions.) 

Sig. Fr. Dresig, Epistola’ de Socrate juste damnato, Leips. 1738. (As an opponent of the legally 
existing democracy, Socrates was justly condemned.) 

M. C. E. Kettner, Socrat. criminis majestatis accus. vind., Leipsic, 1738. 

Joh, Luzac, Oratio de Socrate cive, Leyden, 1796; ef. Lect. Atticae: De διγαμίᾳ Socratis, Leyden, 
1809 (wherein the mutual antipathy of the Peripatetics and Platonists is pointed ont as one among other 
impure sources of many unfavorable narrations respecting Socrates and his disciples). 

Georg Wiggers, Sokrates als Mensch, Biirger und Philosoph, Rostock, 1807, 2d ed., Neustrelitz, 1811. 

Ludolph Dissen, De philosophia morali in Yenophontis de Socrate commentariis tradita, 1812, and 
in D.'s Kleine Schriften, Gétt. 1839, pp. 57-S8. (Dissen brings together in systematic order the Socratic 
thoughts contained in Xenophon, but considers the narrative of Xenophon inexact, on account of his having 
unjustly attributed to Socrates his own utilitarian stand-point.) 

Friedr. Schleiermacher, Ueber den Werth des Socrates als Philosophen, read in the Berlin Akad. der 
Wiss, July 27, 1815, published in the Abh, der philos. Classe, Berlin, 1818, p.50 seq., and in Schleiermacher's 
Sammil, Werke, IIT. 2, 1838, pp. 287-808. (The idea of knowledge, says Schleiermacher, is the central point 
of the Socratic philosophy ; the proof of this is to be found—in view of the discrepancy between the reports 
of the nearest witnesses, the too prosaic Xenophon and the idealizing Plato—in the different character of 
Greek philosophy before and after Socrates. Before him, single departments of philosophy, so far as they 

6 


δῶ SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 


were at all distinguished from each other, were developed by isolated groups of philosophers; while after 
him, all departments were logically discriminated and cultivated by every school. Socrates himself must, 
therefore, while having no system of his own, yet represent the logical principle which makes the construc- 
tion of complete systems possible, ὁ. e., the idea of knowledge.) 

Ferd. Delbriick, Sokrates, Cologne, 1819. 

W. Siivern, Ueber Aristophanes’ Wolken, Berl. 1826. (According to Siivern, Aristophanes confounded 
Socrates with the Sophists.) 

Ch. A. Brandis, Grundlinien der Lehre des Sokrates, in the Rhein. Mus., Vol. I., 1827, pp. 118-150. 

Herm. Theod. Rétscher, Aristophanes und sein Zeitalter, Berlin, 1827. (In this work Rétscher pub- 
lished for the first time in a detailed and popular form—particularly in the section on the “ Clouds "—the 
Hegelian view of Socrates, as the representative of the principle of subjectivity, in opposition to the prin- 
ciple of “substantial morality,” on which the ancient state, according to Hegel, was founded—and of the 
attack of Aristophanes and the subsequent accusation and condemnation of Socrates, as representing the 
conflict of these two principles. Rétscher treats the narrative of Xenophon as the most impartial evidence 
jn regard to the original teaching of Socrates. Cf. Hegel, Phdnomer-ologie des Geistes, p. 560 seq. ; Aesthe- 
tik, IIL. p. 587 seq.; Vorl iiber die Gesch. der Phil., 11. p. 81 seq.) 

Ch. A. Brandis, Ueber die vorgebliche Subjectivitdt der Sokratischen Lehre, Rhein. Mus., 11. 1828, 
pp. 85-112. (In opposition to the view supported by Rétscher, concerning the stand-point of Socrates and 
the fidelity of the accounts of Xenophon.) 

P. W. Forchhammer, Die Athener und Sokrates, die Gesetzlichen und der Revolutiondr, Berlin, 
1887. (Forchhammer goes to an altogether untenable extreme in his recognition of the justification of the 
Athenians in condemning Socrates, yet his special elucidation of the political circumstances is a work 
of merit. Cf. in reference to the same subject, Bendixen, Ueber den tieferen Schriftsinn des revolution- 
aren Sokrates und der gesetzlichen Athener, Huysum, 1838.) 

C. F. Hermann, De Socratis magistris et disciplina juvenili, Marburg, 1857, 

Ph. Guil. van Heusde, Characterismi principum philosophorum veterum, Socratis, Platonis, Aris- 
totelis, Amsterdam, 1829. “On the Cosmopolitanism of Socrates,” “On Xanthippe,” “ On the Clouds of 
Aristophanes ;” in the Verslagen en Med. of the K. Akad. van W., IV. 3, 1859; see the articles in the 
Philologus, XV1., pp. 883 seq. and 566 seq. 

J. W. Hanne, Sokrates als Genius der Humanitdt. Brunswick, 1841. 

C. F. Hermann, De Socratis accusatoribus, Gott. 1854. 

Ernst von Lasaulx, Des Sokrates Leben, Lehre und Tod, nach den Zeugnissen der Alten dargestelit, 
Munich, 1857. 

[J. P. Potter, Characteristics of the Greek Philosophers, Socrates and Plato, London, 1845. R. D. 
Hampden, The Father's of Greek Philosophy (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—articles reprinted from the 
Encyclopedia Britannica), Edinburgh, 1862. E. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, translated 
from the German by O. Reichel, London, 1868.— 77r.] 

E, A. Alberti, Sokrates, ein Versuch tiber ihn nach den Quellen, Gottingen, 1869. 

The political bearings of the trial of Socrates are very comprehensively and exactly developed in G. 
Grote’s History of Greece, chap. 68 (Vol. VIII. pp. 551-684), 

Of the numerous lectures and essays on Socrates we name here the following: C. W. Brumbey, S. nach. 
Diog. L., Lemgo, 1800; Friedr. Aug. Carns, Sokrates, in his Jdeen zur Gesch. der Philos., Leipsic, 1809, 
pp. 514-555; Ε΄, Lélut, Du Démon de Socrate, Paris, 1886; Aug. Boeckh, De Soer. rerwm physicarum 
studio, 1838; H. E. Hummel, De Theologia Soer., Gitt. 1889; J. D. van Hoévell, De Socr. philosophia, 
Groningen, 1840; Zelier, Zur Ehrenrettung der Xanthippe, in the Morgenbiatt fiir gebildete Leser, 1850, 
No. 265 seq., and in Zeller’s Vortrige und Abhandlungen, Leipsic, 1865, pp. 51-61; Hurndall, De philos. 
mor. Socr., Heidelberg, 1858; C. M. Fleischer, De Socr. quam dicunt utopia, “ Progr.” of the Gymn. at 
Cleve, 1855; Hermann Kochly, Sokrates und sein Volk, akadem. Vortrag. gelalten 1855, in Kéchly’s Akad. 

Vortr. und Reden, 1.. Zurich, 1859, pp. 219-886; ef. the review by K. Lehrs in the WV. Jahrb. f. Phil. u. 
Pdd., Vol. LUXXIX., 1859, pp. 555 seq. ; Seibert, Sokr. und Christus, in the Péd. Archiv., ed. by Langbein, 
I., Stettin, 1859, pp. 291-807; L. Noack, Sokrates und die Sophisten, in Psyche, Vol. 11., 1859; G. Mehring, 
Ueber Sokr.,in Fichte’s Zeitschr. f. Philos., Vol. XXXVI., Halle, 1860, pp. 81-119; F. Ueberweg, Ueber 
Sokr., in Gelzer’s Protest. Monatsbi., Vol. XVI., No. 1, July, 1860; Steffensen, 7Lid., Vol. XVII, No. 2; 
A. Bohringer, Der philos. Standpunkt des Sokrates, Carlsruhe, 1860, Ueber die Wolken des Aristophanes, 
ibid., 1863; H. Schmidt, Sokrates, Vortrag gehalten in Wittenberg, Halle, 1860; W. Ἐκ, Volkmann, 
Die Lehre des Sokrates in ihrer histor. Stellung, in the Abh. der Bohm. Ges. der Wiss., Fifth Series, 
Vol. XI., Prague, 1861, pp. 199-222; Bartelmann, De Socrate (G.-Pr.), Oldenburg, 1862; Phil. Jak. 
Ditges, Die epagogische oder inductorische Methode des Sokrates und der Begriff (G.-Pr.), Cologne, 
1864; M. Carriére, δ. τὸ. 8. Stellung in der Gesch. des menschl. Geistes, in Westermann’s Monatsh., 1864, 
No. 92; Bourneville, Socrate était-il fou? réponse ἃ M. Bally, membre de Tacad.,extr.du journal de 
méd, mentale, June, 1864; Ch. H. Bertram, Der Sokrates des Xenophon und dcr des Aristophanes, 


SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 83 


(G.-Progr.), Magdeb. 1865; Franz Dittrich. De Socratis sententia, virtutem esse scientiam, Index Lect. 
Lycei Hosiani, Braunsberg, 1868; Joh. Peters, De Socrate qui est in Atticorum antigua comoedia 
disput. (* Progr.” of the Gymn. at Beuthen), Leipsic, 1869; E. Chaignet, Vie de S., Paris, 1869; P. Montée, 
La philos. de S., Arras, 1869, H. Siebeck (see above, § 27). 

On the intellectual development of Socrates and the relation thereto of Plat., Phaed., 95e, seq., see 
Boeckh in the Swnamer Catalogue, Berlin, 1838; Krische, Forschungen, I. p. 210; Susemihl in the Philolo- 
gus, XX., 1863, p. 226 seq.; Ueberweg, ibid. XXI. 1864, p. 20 seq., and Volquardsen, RA. Mus., New Series, 
XIX. 1864, pp. 505-520. 

On the “ Demon” of Socrates, cf. Kiihner, in his edition of the Memorabilia, (Bibl. Graec., cur. F. 
Jacobs et V. Chr. F. Rost, Scr. Orat. Ped.,) Vol. VIII., Gotha, 1841, pp. 18-25, where other earlier works 
are cited; of later writers, cf., besides Brandis, Zeller, and others, C. F. Volquardsen, Das Démoniwm des 
Sokrates und seine Interpreten, Kiel, 1862; L. Breitenbach, Zeitschrift f. ἃ. Gymnasialwesen, XVII. 1868, 
pp. 499-511; Chr. Cron, in the Hos, siidd. Zeitschr. fiir Philol. u. Gymnasialwesen, ed. by 1. Urlichs, B. 
Stark, and L. y. Jan, 1., Wiarzburg, 1864, pp. 169-179; P. W. Freymiiller, Progr., Metten, 1864; Ferd. 
Fridr. Hiigli, Das Dimoniwm des Sokrates, Berne, 1864. 


For determining the year of the birth of Socrates we find our surest data in the recorded 
year of his death and the number of years that he is known to have lived. Socrates drank 
the cup of poison in the month of Thargelion, in Ol. 95.1 (= 400-399), hence in May or 
June, 399 B. c. (on the 20th of Thargelion, ace. to K. F. Hermann, De Theoria Deliaca, in 
the Index. Lect., Gott. 1846-47). At the time of his condemnation he was, according to 
fis own account in Plat., Apol., 17d, more than seventy years old (ἔτη γεγονὼς πλείω ἐβδο- 
μήκοντα). He must, therefore, have been born at the latest in 469, or rather certainly 
before 469. In the Platonic dialogue Crito(p. 52 6), Socrates represents the laws of Athens 
as saying to him: “For the space of seventy years you have been at liberty, Socrates, to 
quit Athens, if you were dissatisfied with us.” This also points to an age of more than 
seventy years. Hence Ol. 70.1 or 2 is to be assumed as the year of his birth. (Cf Boeckh, 
Corpus Inscript., 11. p. 321, and K. F. Hermann, Plat. Philos., p. 666, Note 522). The 
statement of Apollodorus (Diog. L., II. 44), that Socrates was born in Ol. 77.4, is accord- 
ingly inexact. The 6th of the month Thargelion is given (by Apollodorus, ap. Diog. L., 
ibid., and others) as his birthday, and this day, like the 7th of the same month, as the birth- 
day of Plato, was annually celebrated by the Platonists. But the immediate succession of 
these days one after the other, and still more their coincidence with the days on which the 
Nelians celebrated the birth of (the maieutic) Artemis (6th of Thargelion) and Apollo (Thar- 
gelion 7th), are enough to make it probable that the birthdays assigned to both of these 
philosophers, or at least that of Socrates, are not historical, but were arbitrarily chosen for 
celebration. 

The father of Socrates was a sculptor, and Socrates himself followed his father’s oecu- 
pation for a time; in the time of the Periegetes Pausanias (about A. D. 150), a work executed 
by Socrates (or at least ascribed to him), and representing the Graces attired, was standing 
at the entrance to the Acropolis. Plato makes him allude to his mother in Theaet., p. 
149 a, where he calls himself υἱὸς μαίας μάλα γενναίας te καὶ βλοσυρᾶς, Φαιναρέτης, and 
says of himself that he also practices her art of midwifery, when he entices the ideas of 
his collocutors into the light of day, and examines whether they are genuine and tenable. 
Socrates received at Athens in his youth the education prescribed by the laws (Plat., Crito, 
50d), and made himself also acquainted with geometry and astronomy (Xen., Memor., IV. 7). 
That he “heard” Anaxagoras or Archelaus is reported only by untrustworthy authorities. 
Plato accounts (Phaedo, 97 f.) for his acquaintance with the opinions of Anaxagoras by 
supposing that he had read the work written by that philosopher. Socrates was also 
familiar with the doctrines of other natural philosophers (Mem., I. 1.14; IV. 7. 6), although 
he did not accept them; he read critically (according to Xen., Mem., I. 6. 14; ef. IV. 2.1 
and 8) the writings of the early sages (τοὺς θησαυροὺς τῶν πάλαι σοφῶν ἀνδρῶν, οὖς ἐκεῖνοι 


84 SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 


κατέλιπον ἐν βιβλίοις γράψαντες, ἀνελίττων κοινῇ σὺν τοῖς φίλοις διέρχομαι, Kai ἂν Te ὁρῶμεν 
ἀγαθόν, ἐκλεγόμεθα). The meeting with Parmenides, mentioned by Plato, is probably to pe 
regarded as historic (see above, § 19). A material influence on his philosophical develop- 
ment was exercised by the Sophists, to whose discourses he sometimes listened, and with 
whom he often conversed, and to whom, also, he not unfrequently directed others (Piat., 
Theaet., 151b). He sometimes speaks of himself in Plato’s works (Protag., 841 a; οἵ. 
Meno, 964; Charmides, 163d; Cratyl., 384d; Hipp. Maj., 282 0) as a pupil of Prodicus, yer 
not without a shade of irony, aimed especially at the subtle word-distinctions of thay, 
Sophist. A Platonic testimony respecting the course of the intellectual development ot 
Socrates may be regarded as contained substantially in Phaedo, p. 95 seq., although the 
Platonic conception and representation of Socrates is here, as everywhere, influenced by 
the, not Socratic, but Platonic doctrine of ideas (see Boeckh, in the Sommer- Katalog. 
der Univ., Berlin, 1838, and my Plat. Untersuchungen, Vienna, 1861, pp. 92-94, and later 
works relative to the mental development of Socrates, cited above, p. 83). Plato transfers 
to Socrates from his own thought only that which (like the theory of ideas and the ideat 
of the state) would naturally follow from the views actually held by the historical Socrates ; 
Plato can not have ascribed to Socrates the history of his own mental development, inas- 
much as it was demonstrably other than that portrayed in the passage in question. 

Socrates (according to Pl., Apol., 28 6) took part in three military campaigns, viz.: in 
the campaigns of Potidaea (between 432 and 429, cf. Pl., Sympos., 219 6, and Charm., init.y, 
Delium (424, ef. Symp., 221a, Lach., 181 a), and Amphipolis (422). He demonstrated his 
fidelity to the laws during his life under democratic and oligarchical rulers (Apol., p. 32), 
and at last by scorning to save his life by flight (Pl, Crito, p. 44 seq.). Beyond this, 
Socrates kept himself remote from political affairs. His only vocation, as he believed, was 
to strive, by means of his dialectic, to quicken the moral insight and influence the morak 
conduct of individuals, as he was convinced that this form of activity was most advan- 
tageous for himself and his fellow-citizens (Pl., Apol., p. 29 seq.). 

In the writings of the disciples of Socrates, the latter appears aimost always as a man 
already advanced in years, such as they themselves had known him. In their delineations 
of his character, the leading feature is the utter discrepancy between the interior and the 
extertor—which, to the Hellenic mind, accustomed to harmony, was an dtorov—his simi- 
Jarity with Sileni and Satyrs in personal appearance and the homeliness of his conversa- 
tional discourses, combined with the most sterlmg moral worth, the most complete self- 
control in pleasure and privation, and a masterly talent in philosophical dialogue (Xen.., 
Mem., IV. 4.5; IV. 8. 11 et al.; Sympos., IV. 19; V.5; Plat., Symp., pp. 215, 221). 

In their account of the life of Socrates, the two principal authorities, Xenophon and 
Plato, substantially agree, although the Platonic picture is sketched with the more delicate 
hand. As to their reports of his doctrine, it is, first of all, unquestionably true that Plato 
in his dialogues generally presents his own thoughts through the mouth of Socrates. But in 
a certain sense his dialogues can, nevertheless, serve as authorities for the Socratic teaching, 
because the groundwork of the philosophy of Plato is contained in that of Socrates, and 
because it is possible, in general, though not in all cases in detail, to discriminate between 
the Platonic and Socratic elements. Plato took care not to be led by his love of idealization 
too far from historic truth; in some of his compositions (in the Apology, in Crito, and in 
part also in the Protagoras, Laches, etc.) he remains almost entirely faithful to it, and in 
others puts those doctrines which Socrates could not have professed into the mouth of 
other philosophers. Xenophon wrote the Memor. and the Sympostum (for the so-called 
“ Apology of Xenophon” is spurious) not so much in the spirit of a pure historian as in 
that of an apologist ; but his honorable defense of Socrates demands from us full confidence 


SOCRATES OF ΑἸΗΈΝΒ. δῷ 


in his historic fidelity, so far as his intention is concerned. But it must be acknowledged 
that as much can not be said of his intellectual qualification for an exact and comprehensive 
understanding of the Socratic philosophy. Xenophon appears to attribute too uncon- 
ditionally to Socrates the tendency, natural to himself, to connect all scientific activity with 
a practical purpose, and he thus gives too small a place to the dialectic of Socrates, as 
compared with his ethical teachings. The brief statements of Aristotle respecting the 
philosophical doctrines of Socrates are very valuable, since they are purely historical, and 
relate to the most important points of his teaching. 

We read in the Metaphysics of Aristotle (XIII. 4), that Socrates introduced the method 
of induction and definition (which sets out from the individual and ends in the definition 
of the general notion—rotc τ᾽ ἐπακτικοὺς λόγους καὶ τὸ ὁρίζεσθαι καθόλου). The field of 
investigation in which Socrates employed this method is designated by Aristotle as the 
ethical (Metaph., I. 6). The fundamental conception of Socrates was, according to the same 
authority, the izseparable union of theoretical insight with practical 1 mor: al excellence (Arist, 
Eth. Nicom., V1. 13: Σωκράτης φρονήσεις weto εἶναι πάσας τὰς ἀρετάς". πος λύγος, "Τὰς ἀρετὰς 
ᾧετο εἶναι" ἐπιστήμας γὰρ εἶναι πάσας, cf. Xen., Mem., II. 9. 4 seq.). We find these state- 
ments fully confirmed by Plato and Xenophon; only Aristotle may have described Socrates’ 
ideas in more definite, technical language than was used by their author (Xen., Memor., 
1.1. 16: αὐτὸς δὲ περὶ τῶν ἀνϑρωπείων ἂν ἀεὶ διελέγετο, σκοπῶν, Ti εὐσεβές͵ τί ἀσεβές τί 
καλόν, τί αἰσχρόν " τί δίκαιον, τί ἄδικον " τί σωφροσύνη, τί μανία " τί ἀνδρεία, τί δειλία " τί πόλις, 
τί πολιτικός " τί ἀρχὴ ἀνϑρώπων, τίς ἀρχικὸς ἀνθρώπων, καὶ περὶ τῶν ἄλλων, ἃ τοὺς μὲν εἰδότας 
ἡγεῖτο καλοὺς κἀγαϑοὺς εἶναι, τοὺς δ᾽ ἀγνοοῦντας ἀνδραποδώδεις ἂν δικαίως κεκλῆσϑαι. Ib. 
IV. 6. 1: σκοπῶν σὺν τοῖς συνοῦσι, τί ἕκαστον εἴη τῶν ὄντων, οὐδεπώποτ᾽ ἔληγεν. Id. 111. 
4. 9 seq.: σοφίαν δὲ καὶ σωφροσύνην οὐ διώριζεν-. .. ἔφη δὲ καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην καὶ τὴν ἄλλην 
πᾶσαν ἀρετὴν σοφίαν εἶναι). Holding these opinions, Socrates was convinced that virtue 
was capable of being taught, that all virtue was in truth only one, and that no one was 
voluntarily wicked, all wickedness resulting merely from ignorance (Xen., Memorab., III. 9; 
IV. 6; ef. Sympos., 11. 12; Plat., Apol., 25e, Protag., p. 329 Ὁ, seq., 352). The good 
(ἀγαθόν) is identical with the beautiful (καλόν) and the useful (ὠφέλιμον - xprotuov—Mem.., 
IV. 6. 8 and 9; Protag., 333 ἃ, 353 ο, seq.). Better than good fortune (εὐτυχία), which is 
accidental, is a correct praxis, arising from insight and self-discipline (εὐπραξία, Mem., III. 
9.14). Self-knowledge, fulfillment of the requirement of the Delphian Apollo, “ Know 
thyself,” is the condition of practical excellence (Mem., IV. 2. 24). External goods do not 
advance their possessor. To want nothing is divine; to want the least possible, brings 
one nearest to divine perfection (Xen., Memor., I. 6. 10). Cicero’s well-known declaration 
(Acad. post, I. 4,15; Tusc., V. 4.10; ef. Diog. L., II. 21), that “Socrates called philosophy 
down from the heavens to earth, and introduced it into the cities and houses of men, 
compelling men to inquire concerning life and morals and things good and evil,” indicates, 
in terms substantially correct, the progress of philosophy in Socrates from the cosmology 
and physics of his predecessors to anthropological ethics. Socrates, however, possessed 
no complete system of ethical doctrines, but only the living instinct of inquiry, and could, 
therefore, naturally arrive at definite ethical theorems only in conversation with others. 
Hence his art was intellectual midwifery (as Plato terms it, Theaet., p. 149); he enticed 
forth thoughts from the mind of the respondent and subjected them to examination. With 
his confessed ignorance,—which yet, as reposing on a lively and exact consciousness of 
the nature of true knowledge, stood higher than the pretended knowledge of his collocu- 
tors,—was connected the Socratic irony (εἰρώνεια), or the apparent deference of Socrates 
to the superior intelligence and wisdom o others, until these vanished into nothingness 
before that dialectical testing, in the course οὐ. which he compared the asserted general 


86 SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 


wruth with admitted particular facts. In this manner Socrates exercised the vocation 
which he believed had been indicated for him by the Delphic god, when, in reply to 
Chaerephon, the oracle declared that Socrates was the wisest of men—the vocation, namely, 
of examining men (ἐξέτασις, Plat., Apol., p. 20 seq.). He devoted his life especially to the 
education of youth. For the accomplishment of this end he relied on the aid of ἔρως, 
love, which, without excluding its sensuous element, he refined and utilized as an instru- 
ment in the conduct of souls and the common development of his thoughts and those of 
his listeners. 

The fundamental thought in the political doctrine of Socrates is that authority prop- 
erly belongs to the intelligent (ἐπιστάμενος), to him who possesses knowledge (Xenoph., 
Memorab., 111. 9.10; ef. III. 6.14). The good ruler must be, as it were, a shepherd to 
those whom he rules (the ποιμὴν λαῶν͵ of Homer). His business, his “‘ virtue,” is to make 
them happy (τὸ εὐδαίμονας ποιεῖν ὧν ἂν ἡγῆται, Mem., III. 2. 4; cf. 1. 2.32). Socrates found 
fault with the appointment of officers by popular suffrage and by lot (Jlem., I. 2.9; 
{ΠῚ 9. 10): 

The peculiar philosophical significance of Socrates lies in his logically rigorous reflec- 
tion upon moral questions, his combination of the spirit of research with that of doubt, 
and his dialectical method of demolishing seeming and conducting to true knowledge. 
But since reflection, from its very nature, is occupied with the universal, while action in 
every specific case relates only to the particular, it is necessary for the existence of prac- 
lical ability that the habit of reflection should be accompanied by a certain practical insight 
or tact, which also involves moral tact, although not exclusively, nor even mainly, confined 
to the latter. This tact respects chiefly the favorable or unfavorable result to be expected 
from a given action or course of action. Socrates recognized reflection as man’s peculiar 
work; but that immediate conviction of the suitableness or unsuitableness of certain 
actions, of whose origin he was not conscious, but which he recognized as a sign pointing 
him to the right way, he piously ascribed, without subjecting it to psychological analysis, 
to divine agency. This divine leading is that which he designates as his δαιμόνιον. In the 
Apology of Plato (p. 31d), Socrates says: “The reason of my remaining apart from public 
life is ὅτε μοι θεῖόν τι καί δαιμόνιον γίγνεται," and he goes on to explain that from his youth 
up he had been ever cognizant of a voice, which only warned, but never encouraged him. 
This voice he terms, in the Phaedrus, “his demonic and familiar sign” (τὸ δαιμόνιόν τε Kai 
τὸ εἰωθὸς σημεῖον. According to Xen., Memor., IV. 8. 5, this δαιμόνιον interposed its 
warning when he was about to reflect on the defense he should make before his judges, 
7. e., his practical tact showed him that it was worthier of him and better for his cause, 
that he should give himself exclusively over to the solemn inspiration of the moment, than 
by rhetorical preparation to prejudice his hopes of such inspiration. Less exact is the 
occasional statement of Xenophon, that Socrates was shown by the δαιμόνιον “ what things 
he ought to do and what not” (a te χρὴ ποιεῖν καὶ ἃ μή, Mem., I. 4. 15; IV. 3.12). The 
power from which this voice emanated is designated as ‘‘the God” (ὁ θεός, Mem., IV. 8. 6), 
or “the Gods” (οἱ θεοί, Mem., I. 4. 15; IV. 3.12), the same Gods who also speak to men 
by the oracles. 

Socrates defends the belief in the existence of gods on teleological grounds, arguing 
from the structure of organized beings, whose parts are subservient to the wants of the 
whole, and founding his reasoning on the general principle, that whatever exists for a use 
must be the work of intelligence (πρέπει μὲν τὰ ἐπ᾽ ὠφελείᾳ γιγνόμενα γνώμης ἔργα εἶναι. 
Memor., J. 4. 4 seq.; IV. 8. 8. seq.). The Wisdom (φρόνησις), says Socrates, which is present 
and rules in all that exists, determines all things according to its good pleasure. It is 
distinguished from the other gods as the ruler and disposer of the universe (ὁ τὸν 640’ 


SOCRATES OF ATHENS. 87 


κόσμον συντάττων τε καὶ συνέχων). The gods, like the human soul, are invisible, but make 
known their existence unmistakably by their operations (Memor., IV. 3. 13). 

Aristophanes, in the ‘‘ Clouds” (which were first represented in 423 8, C.), attributes to 
Socrates not only traits of character and doctrines which really belonged to him, but also 
Anaxagorean doctrines and Sophistic tendencies. The ground of the possibility of this 
misapprehension (or, if the expression is preferred, of this poetical license) is to be found, 
on the part of Socrates, not only in the fact that he stood, as a philosopher, in a certain 
antagonism to the general popular consciousness, and that the Anaxagorean theology had 
not remained without a considerable influence upon him, but more especially in the fact 
that, as a philosopher whose reflection was directed to the subjective processes and 
phenomena, and who made action dependent on such reflection, he moved in the same 
general sphere with the Sophists, being specifically differentiated from them only by the 
peculiar direction or kind of his philosophizing. On the part of Aristophanes, it is to bs 
found in the fact that he, as a poet and not a philosopher, and (so far as he is in earnest in 
his representations) as an anti-Sophistical moralist and patriotic citizen of the old school, 
with his conviction of the immorality and dangerousness of all philosophy, scarcely con- 
sidered the significance of specific differences among philosophers as worthy of his atten- 
tion, not to say, was unable to appreciate their essential importance. 

The same opinion respecting Socrates which we find in Aristophanes, seems also to have 
been entertained by his accusers. Meletus is described in Plato’s Huthyphron (p. 2b) as a 
young man, little known, and personally almost a stranger to Socrates. In the Platonic 
Apologia it is said of him that he joined in the accusation because he felt himself injured by 
Socrates’ demonstration of the ignorance of poets respecting the nature of their art (ὑπὲρ 
τῶν ποιητῶν ἀχθόμενος, Apol., p. 23e). Perhaps he was a son of the poet Meletus, whom 
Aristophanes mentions in the “ Frogs” (vy. 1802). Anytus, a rich leather-dealer, was an 
influential demagogue, who had fled from Athens during the rule of the Thirty, and had 
returned fighting on the side of Thrasybulus; Socrates says in the Apologia (p. 23 e) that 
he joined in the accusation as a representative of the tradesmen and politicians (ὑπὲρ τῶν 
δημιουργῶν Kai τῶν πολιτικῶν ἀ χθόμενος), and in the Meno (p. 94e) it is intimated that he was 
displeased with the depreciatory judgment of Socrates respecting the Athenian statesmen. 
According to the Apology of Pseudo-Xenophon (29 seq.), he was angry with Socrates 
because the latter thought his son fitted for something better than the leather business, 
and had counseled him to educate this son for something higher. Lycon felt injured 
by what Socrates had said of the orators (ὑπὲρ τῶν ῥητόρων, Apol., 23 6). The accusation 
ran as follows (Apol., p. 24; Xen., Mem., 1. 1; Favorinus, ap. Diog. L., Il. 40): rade 
ἐγράψατο καὶ ἀντωμόσατο Μέλητος Μελήτου Πιτϑεὺς Σωκράτει Σωφρονίσκου ᾿Αλωπεκῆϑεν * ἀδικεῖ 
Σωκράτης οὗς μὲν ἡ πόλις νομίζει ϑεοὺς ov νομίζων, ἕτερα δὲ καινὰ δαιμόνια εἰσηγούμενος͵ ἀδικεῖ δὲ 
καὶ τοὺς νέους διαφθείρων. τίμημα - ϑάνατος. The ordinary objections against all philosophers 
were directed against Socrates, without any special investigation of the peculiar tendency 
or aim of his teachings (Apol.; 23d). The particular charges which Xenophon (I. ch. 2.) 
cites and labors to refute, appear (as Cobet, Novae Lectiones, Leyden, 1858, p. 662 seq., 
seeks to demonstrate—yet cf. Biichsensehiitz, in the Philologus, XXII., p. 691 seq.) to have 
been taken, not from the speeches of the accusers, but from a work by Polycrates, the 
rhetorician, written after the death of Socrates, in justification of the sentence. The 
conduct of Socrates is described by Plato with historic fidelity in the essential outlines, 
in the Apol., in Crito, and in the first and last parts of the Phaedo. The Parrhesia of 
Socrates appeared to his judges as presumptuousness. His philosophical reflection seemed 
to them a violation of those ethical and religious foundations of the Athenian state, which 
the restored democracy were endeavoring to re-establish. The former intimacy of Socrates 


‘ 


88 THE DISCIPLES OF SOCRATES. 


with Alcibiades, and especially with the hated aristocrat, Critias (cf. Auschines, Adv. 
Timarch., § 11), led to a mistrust of his doctrines and purposes. Nevertheless, the con- 
demnation was voted by only a small majority of voices; according to Apol., p. 36a, he 
would have been acquitted if only three, or, according to another reading, thirty of the 
judges had been of a different mind; so that of the probably 500 or 501 judges, either 253 
or 280 must have voted for his condemnation, and 247-248 or 220-221 for his acquittal. 
But since, after the condemnation, he would not acknowledge himself guilty by expressing 
an opinion as to the punishment he should receive, but declared himself worthy, on the 
contrary, of being fed at the Prytaneum as a benefactor of the state, and at last only on 
the persuasion of his friends agreed to a fine of thirty mine, he was (according to Diog. L., 
IT, 42) condemned to death by a majority increased by eighty votes. The execution of the 
sentence had to be delayed thirty days, until the return of the sacred ship, which had been 
sent only the day before the condemnation with an embassy to Delos. Socrates scorned 
as unlawful the means of escape which Crito had prepared for him. He drank the cup of 
poison in his prison, surrounded by his disciples and friends, with perfect steadfastness 
and tranquillity of soul, full of assurance that the death which was to attest his fidelity to 
his convictions would be most advantageous for him and for his work. 

The Athenians are reported soon afterward to have regretted their sentence. Yeta 
more general revulsion of opinion in favor of Socrates seems first to have taken place in 
consequence of the labors of his scholars. That the accusers were, some exiled, some put 
to death, as later writers relate (Diodorus, XIV. 37; Plut., De Jnvid., c. 6; Diog. L., 11. 43, 
VI. 9 seq., and others) is probably only a fable, which was apparently founded on the fact 
that Anytus (banished, perhaps, for political reasons) died, not in Athens, but in Heraclea 
on the Pontus, where in later centuries his tomb was still pointed out. 


, 


§ 34. In the Socratic principle of knowledge and virtue, the prob- 
lem for the successors of Socrates was indicated beforehand. That 
problem was the development of the philosophical disciplines termed 
dialectic and ethics. Of his immediate disciples (so far as they were 
of philosophical significance) the larger number, as “ partial disciples 
of Socrates,” turned their attention predominantly to the one or the 
other part of this double problem; the Megaric or Eristic school of 
Euclid and the Elian school of Phedo occupying themselves almost 
exclusively with dialectical investigations, and the Cynic school of 
Antisthenes and the Hedonic or Cyrenaic school of Aristippus treat- 
ing, in different senses, principally of ethical questions. In each of 
these schools, at the same time, some one of the various types of pre- 
Socratic philosophy was continued and expanded. It was Plato, 
however, who first combined and developed into the unity of a com- 
prehensive system the different sides of the Socratic spirit, as well as 
all the legitimate elements of earlier systems. 


K. ΕΞ Hermann, Die philosophische Stellung der dlteren Sokratiker und ihrer Schulen, in his 
Ges. Abhandlungen, Gottingen, 1849, pp. 227-255. 

On #schines, ef. K. F. Hermann, De Aeschinis Socratici reliquiis disp. acad., Gott. 1850. 

On Xenophon, ef. A. Boeckh, De simultate, quam Plato cum Xenophonte ewercuisse fertur, Berlin, 
1811; Niebuhr, KZ. Schriften, I., p. 467 seq.; F. Delbriick, Yenophon, Bonn, 1829 ; Hirschig, De disciplinae 


EUCLID OF MEGARA AND HIS SCHOOL. 89 


Socraticae in vitam et mores antiquorum vi et efficacitate,in Xenophontis decem mille Graecos ex 
Asia salvos in patriam reducentis ecemplo manifesta, in: Symbolae Uitt., 111.. Amsterdam, 1839; J. Ὁ. 
van Hoévell, De Xenophontis philosophia, Groning. 1840; J. H. Lindemann, Die Lebensansicht des Xen., 
Conitz, 1843; Die rel.-sittl. Weltunsschauung des Herodot, Thucydides und Xenophon, Berlin, 1852; P. 
Werner, Xenoph. de rebus publ. sentent., Breslau, 1851; Engel, X. polit, Stellung und Wirksamkeit, 
Stargard, 1858; A. Garnier, Histoire de la Morale: Xenophon, Paris, 1857. 

Cf. also the articles by A. Hug, Philol., VIL, 1852. pp. 638-695; and K. F. Hermann, Philol., VIIL, 
881 seq.; and the opuscule of Georg Ferd. Rettig, Univ.-Pr., Berne, 1564, on the mutual relation of the 
Xenophontic and Platonic Symposia, and Arn. Hug’s Die Unechtheit der dem Xenophon zugeschriebenen 
Apologie des Socrates, in Herm. Kéchly’s Akad. Vortr. u. Reder, Zurich, 1859, pp. 480-489. See also H. 
Henkel, Yenophon und Isocrates (Progr.), Salzwedel, 1866 (cf. P. Sanneg, De Schola Isocratea, diss., 
Halle, 1867); and A. Nicolai, Yenophon’s Cyropddie und seine Ansicht vom Staat (Progr.), Bernburg, 
1867, 


Xenophon, who was born about 444 B. c. (according to Cobet, 430), died about 354 8. c., 
and belongs to the older disciples of Socrates. His Cyropaedia is a philosophical and political 
novel, illustrating the fundamental Socratic principle that authority is the prerogative of the 
intelligent, who alone are qualified to wield it; but it is to be confessed that the “‘intelli- 
gent” man, as depicted by Xenophon, is, as Erasmus justly says (cf. Hildebrand, Gesch. u. 
Syst. d. Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie, I. p. 249), “‘rather a prudent and skillfully calcu- 
lating politician than a truly wise and just ruler.” Xenophon and A‘schines are scarcely 
to be reckoned among the representatives of any special philosophical type or school. 
They belong rather to the class of men who, following Socrates with sincere veneration, 
strove, through intercourse with him, to attain to whatever was beautiful and good (καλο- 
κἀγαθία). Others, as, notably, Critias and Alcibiades, sought by association with Socrates 
to enlarge the range of their intelligence, yet without bringing themselves permanently 
under his moral influence. Few out of the great number of the companions of Socrates 
proposed to themselves as a life-work the development of his philosophical ideas. 

The expression “‘ partial disciples of Socrates,” is not to be understood as implying that 
the men so named had only reproduced certain sides of the Socratic philosophy. On the 
contrary, they expanded the doctrines of their master, each in a definite province of 
philosophy and in a specific direction, and even their renewal of earlier philosophemes may 
be described rather as a self-appropriating elaboration of the same than as a mere combina- 
tion of them with Socratic doctrines. In like relation stands Plato to the entire body of 
Socratic and pre-Socratic philosophy. While Cicero’s affirmation is true of the other 
companions of Socrates (De Orat., III. 16, 61): “ex illius (Socratis) variis et diversis et in 
omnem partem diffusis disputationibus alius aliud apprehendit,” Plato combined the various 
elements, the, so to speak, prismatically broken rays of the Socratic spirit in a new, higher, 
and richer unity. 


§ 85. Euclid of Megara united the ethical principle of Socrates 
with the Eleatic theory of the One, to which alone true being could 
be ascribed. He teaches: The good is one, although called by many 
names, as intelligence, God, reason. The opposite of the good is 
without being. The good remains ever immutable and like itself. 
The supposition that Euclid, without detracting from the unity of the 
good or the truly existent, nor from the unity of virtue, also assumed 
a multiplicity of unchangeable essences, is very improbable. The 
method of demonstration employed by Euclid was, like that of Zeno, 
the indirect. The most noted of the followers of Euclid were Eubu- 


90 EUCLID ΟΕ MEGARA AND HIS SCHOOL. 


lides the Milesian, and Alexinus—celebrated for the invention of the 
sophistical arguments known as the Liar, the Concealed, the Measure 
of Grain, the Horned Man, the Bald-head ; Diodorus Cronus—known 
as the author of new arguments against motion, and of the assertion 
that only the necessary is real and only the real is possible; and the 
disciple of Diodorus, Philo, the dialectician (a friend of Zeno of 
Cittium). Stilpo of Megara combined the Megaric philosophy with 
the Cynic. He argued against the doctrine of ideas. The dialectical 
doctrine, that nothing can be predicated except of itself, and the 
ethical doctrine, that the wise man is superior to pain, are ascribed 
to him. 


On the Megarians, cf. Georg Ludw. Spalding, Vindiciae philos. Megaricorum, Berlin, 1793; Ferd. 
Deycks, De Megaricorum doctrina, Bonn, 1827; Heinr. Ritter, Bemerkungen iiber die Philos. der Mega- 
rischen Schule, in the Rhein. Mus. f. Philol., 11. 1828, p. 295 seq.; Henne, Heole de Megare, Paris, 1843 ; 
Mallet, Histoire de Vécole de Mégare et des écoles αἱ Elis et d’ Hretrie, Paris, 1845; Hartenstein, Ueber die 
Bedeutung der Megarischen Schule fiir die Geschichte der metaphysischen Probleme, in the Verhandl 
der sachs. Gesellsch. der Wiss., 1848, p. 190 seq.; Prantl, Gesch. der Logik, I. p. 33 seq. 


Of Euclid the Megarian (who must not be confounded with the Alexandrian mathema- 
tician, who lived a century later) it is related (Gell., Noct. Att., VI. 10) that, at the time 
when the Athenians had forbidden the Megarians, under penalty of death, to enter their 
city, he often ventured, for the sake of intercourse with Socrates, under cover of evening 
to come to Athens. Since this interdict was issued in Olymp. 87.1, Euclid must have been 
one of the earliest disciples of Socrates, if this story is historical. He was present at the 
death of Socrates (Phaedo, p. 59 c), and the greater part of the companions of Socrates are 
reported to have gone to him at Megara soon afterward, perhaps in order that they too 
might not fall victims to the hatred of the democratic rulers in Athens against philosophy 
(Diog. L., II. 106; III. 6). Euclid appears to have lived and to have remained at the head 
of the school founded by him, during several decades after the death of Socrates. Early 
made familiar with the Eleatic philosophy, he modified the same, under the influence of 
the Socratic ethics, making the One identical with the good. The school of Euclid is 
treated of by Diog. Laért., in his Vitae Philos., II. 108 seq» 

The author of the dialogue Sophistes mentions (p. 246 b, seq.) a doctrine, according to 
which the sphere of true being was made up of a multiplicity of immaterial, absolutely 
unchangeable forms (εἰ δη), accessible only to thought. Many modern investigators (in par- 
ticular Schleiermacher, Ast, Deycks, Brandis, K. F. Hermann, Zeller, Prantl, and others) refer 
this doctrine to the Megarians; others (especially Rittery as above cited, Petersen, in the 
Zeitschrift fiir Alterthumswiss, 1856, p. 892, and Mallet, zbéd. XXXIV.) dispute this. In 
defense of the latter position may be urged the inconsequence which the doctrine would 
imply on the part of Euclid, if ascribed to him, and also the testimony of Aristotle (Metaph., 
I. 6 seq.; XIII. 4), according to which Plato must be regarded as the proper author of the 
theory of ideas, whence it results that this theory can not have been professed by Euclid 
under any form. The passage in the Sophistes must, in case Plato was the author of that 
dialogue, be interpreted as representing the opinion of partial Platonists (cf. my Unter- 
suchungen tiber die Echtheit und Zeitfolge Platonischer Schriften, Vienna, 1861, p. 277 seq.). 
But since the dialogue (as Schaarschmidt has shown, cf. Ueberweg in Bergmann's Philos. 
Mon., 111. p. 479) was probably composed by some Platonist, who modified the doctrine of 


PHEZDO OF ELIS AND HIS SCHOOL. 91 


Plato, the passage in question is rather to be considered as referring to Plato's theory of 
ideas, or perhaps to an interpretation of it, which the author of the dialogue thought inexact. 
Cf. Schaarschmidt, Die Sammlung der Platonischen Schriften, Bonn, 1866, p. 210 seq. 

The doctrine of Euclid (as given at the beginning of this section) is expressed by Diog. 
L., IL. 106, in these words: οὗτος ἔν τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἀπεφαίνετο πολλοῖς ὀνόμασι καλούμενον - ὁτὲ 
μὲν γὰρ φρόνησιν, ὁτὲ δὲ θεὸν καὶ ἄλλοτε νοῦν καὶ τὰ λοιπά. τὰ δὲ ἀντικείμενα τῷ ἀγαθῷ ἀνήρει͵ 
μὴ εἶναι φάσκων. Such a principle was not capable of being positively developed into 
a philosophical system; it could only lead to a continued war with current opinions, 
which the Megarians sought to refute by a deductio ad absurdwm. This is the philo- 
sophical meaning of the Megaric “ Eristic.” 

Stilpo, who taught at Athens about 320 B.c., is said by Diog. L. (II. 119) to have 
assumed a polemical attitude with reference to the theory of ideas (ἀνήρει καὶ τὰ εἴδη). 
Such an attitude would be in logical accordance with the exclusive doctrine of unity, 
which Stilpo held with the earlier Megarians (according to Aristocles, see Euseb., Pr. Ev., 
XIV. 17.1). Stilpo proclaimed insensibility (ἀπάθεια) as the proper end of all moral 
endeavor (cf. Senec., Ep. 9: hoc inter nos (Stoicos) et illos interest: noster sapiens vincit 
quidem incommodum omne, sed sentit; illorwm ne sentit quidem). The sage is so sufficient 
to himself, that not even friends are necessary for his happiness. One of Stilpo’s disciples 
was Zeno of Cittium, the founder of the Stoic school (see below, § 52). On the other hand, 
the Skeptics, Pyrrho and Timon, seem also to have taken the doctrine of the Megarians 
for their point of departure (see § 60). 


§ 36. Pheedo of Elis, a favorite disciple of Socrates, founded, after 
the death of the latter, in his native city, a philosophical school, 
which appears to have resembled in tendency and character the 
Megarie school. Menedemus, who enjoyed the instructions of 
Platonists and Phedonists and of Stilpo, transplanted the Elian 
school to his native city, Eretria, whence his followers received the 
name of Eretrians. 


L. Preller, Phaedons Lebensschicksale und Schriften, in the Rhein. Mus. f. Philol., New Series, 1V., 
1846, pp. 891-399, revised in Ersch and Gruber’s Hncykl., Sect. IIL, Vol. XXL, p. 857 seq., and now pub. 
lisbed in Preller’s Kleine Schriften, ed. by R. Kohler. 


Pheedo, the founder of the Elian school, is the same person whom Plato represents in 
the dialogue named after him, as recounting to Echecrates the last conversations of Socrates. 
According to Diog. L., II. 105, he was ransomed from the condition of a prisoner of war 
by Crito, at the instance of Socrates. He is said to have written dialogues; yet the 
genuineness of most of the dialogues which bore his name was disputed. Of his doctrines 
we know little. 

Of Phedo’s (indirect) disciple, Menedemus (who lived 352-276 B. c.), Heraclides 
(Lembus) says (ap. Diog. L., II. 135), that he espoused the opinions of Plato, but only 
sported with dialectic. Both statements are not to be taken in too rigorous a sense. 
Compare, however, Heinrich von Stein, Gesch. des Platonismus, II. Gott. 1864, p. 202 seq. 
Respecting his ethical tendency, Cicero says (Acad., IV. 42, 129): a Menedemo Eretriaci 
appellati, quorum omne bonum in mente positum et mentis acie, gua rerum cerneretur. Like 
the Megarians, he regarded all virtues as one, though called by different names. He 
defined virtue as rational insight, with which he seems, like Socrates, to have considered 
right endeavor as inseparably connected. 


92 ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNIC SCHOOL. 


§ 37. Antisthenes of Athens, at first a pupil of Gorgias, but after- 
ward of Socrates, taught, after the death of the latter, in the gym- 
nasium called Cynosarges, whence his school was called the Cynic 
school. Virtue, he taught, is the only good. Enjoyment, sought as 
an end, is an evil. The essence of virtue lies in self-control. Virtue 
is one. It is capable of being taught, and, when once acquired, can 
not be lost. The safest wall for a town is knowledge based on secure 
inferences. Virtue requires not many words, but only Soeratic force. 
Antisthenes combats the Platonic theory of ideas. He grants the 
validity only of identical judgments. His assertion that contradiction 
is impossible, gives evidence of his lack of earnestness in the treatment 
of dialectical problems. The opposition to the political forms and 
the polytheism of the Hellenic race, which remained still undeveloped 
in Socrates, pronounced itself distinctly in the cosmopolitism of An- 
tisthenes and in his doctrine of the unity of God. 

To the school of Antisthenes belong Diogenes of Sinope, Crates 
of Thebes, Hipparchia, the wife of Crates, Metrocles, her brother, 
and others. 


The Cynics are treated of and the fragments of their writings are brought together in Mullach’s 
Fragm. Philos. Gr., 11. pp. 261-395. 

The fragments extant of the works of Antisthenes have been edited by Aug. Wilh. Winckelmann, 
Zurich, 1842. Cf. Krische, Morschungen, I. pp. 234-246; Chappuis, Antisthéne, Paris, 1854; Ad. Miller, 
De Antisthenis Cynici vita et scriptis (“ Progr.” of the Vitzth.-G.), Dresden, 1860. 

On Diogenes, cf. Karl Wilh. Géttling, D. der Cyniker oder die Philosophie des griechischen Pro- 
letariats, in his Ges. Abhandl., Vol. I., Halle, 1851; Hermann, Zur Gesch. und Kritik des Diogenes von 
Sinope (G.-Pr.), Heilbronn, 1860; Wehrmann, Ueber den Cyniker D., in the Paddag. Archiv., 1861, pp. 
97-117. ᾿ 

On Crates, οἵ, Postumus, De Crat., Gron. 1823, The 38 (spurious) letters ascribed to him are edited by 
Boissonade in Notices et Hxtraits de Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque du Roi, t. 1X., Paris, 1827. 

F. V. Fritsche treats of the fragments by Demonax, in De Fragm. Demonactis Philos., Rostock and 
Leipsic, 1866. Cf. Lucian, in his Vita Demonactis, and A. Recknagel, Comm. de Demonactis phitos., 
Nuremberg, 1857. 


Antisthenes, born at Athens in Olymp. 84.1 (444 8. C.), was the son of an Athenian 
father and a Thracian mother (Diog. L., VI. 1). For this reason he was restricted to 
the gymnasium called Cynosarges. . In the rhetorical form of his dialogical writings 
Antisthenes betrayed the influence of Gorgias’ instruction. He went to Socrates first in 
later life, for which reason he is designated in the Sophisies (p. 251 b, where without doubt 
he is referred to) as the ‘‘late learner” (ὀψιμαθήῆς). Plato (Theaet., 158 6 ; ef. Soph., 251 Ὁ, 
seq.) and Aristotle (Metaph., XIII. 3) criticise him as lacking in culture. Before becoming 
a disciple of Socrates, he had already given instruction in rhetoric (Diog. L., VI. 2), an 
occupation which he also afterward resumed. He appears to have lived thirty years after 
the death of Socrates (Diodorus, XV. 76). In external appearance Antisthenes, most of all 
the disciples of Socrates, resembled his master, with whom he stood on terms of intimate 
personal friendship. The titles of numerous works by Antisthenes are given in Diog. 
L., VI. 15-18. 


ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNIC SCHOOL. 93 


Antisthenes holds fast to the Socratic principle of the unity of virtue and knowledge. 
He emphasizes chiefly its practical side, though not wholly neglecting its dialectica{ 
bearings. 

Antisthenes (according to Diog. L., VI. 3) first defined definition (λόγος) as the expres- 
sion of the essence of the thing defined: λόγος ἐστὶν ὁ τὸ τί ἦν ἢ ἔστε δηλῶν (where the 
Imperfect ἦν seems to point to the priority of objective existence before the subjective acts 
of knowing and naming). The simple, said Antisthenes, is indefinable: it can only be 
named and compared; but the composite admits of an exposition, in which the component 
parts are enumerated conformably to the actual order and manner of their combination. 
Knowledge is correct opinion based on definition (7. e., logically accounted for), δόξα ἀληθὴς 
μετὰ λόγου (Plat., Theaet., p. 201 seq., where indeed Antisthenes is not named, but is prob- 
ably meant; Arist., Metaph., VIII. 3). According to Simplic., Ad Arist. Categ., f. 66 Ὁ, 45, 
the following argument against the Platonic doctrine of ideas was attributed to Antis- 
thenes: ὦ Πλάτων͵ ἵππον μὲν ὁρῶ, ἱππότητα δ᾽ οὐχ ὁρῶ, “Ο Plato, I see horses, but no 
horseness ᾽ (because, Plato is said to have replied, you have no eye for it). According to 
Ammon. Ad Porphyr. Isag., 22 Ὁ, Antisthenes said that the ideas were ἐν ψιλαῖς ἐπινοίαις, 
from which it is hardly to be inferred that Antisthenes attempted to transform the doctrine 
of ideas in a subjective sense (as the Stoics did later); he meant probably only to describe 
Plato’s theory of ideas as anempty fancy. Somewhat sophistical is the doctrine attributed 
to Antisthenes in Arist., Top., I. 11, and Met., V. 29 (cf. Plat., Huthyd., 285 6), that it is 
impossible to contradict one’s self (οὐκ ἔστιν ἀντιλέγειν), together with the argument: 
either the same thing is subject of the two supposed contradictory affirmations—and 
then, since each thing has only one οἰκεῖος λόγος, these affirmations are equivalent, and 
not contradictory—or the affirmations relate to different subjects, and. consequently 
there is no contradiction. The last result of this dialectical tendency was reached in 
the doctrine that only identical judgments are valid (Plat.? Soph., 251 Ὁ; Arist., Metaph., 
V. 29). 

According to Diog. L., VI. 104 seq., Antisthenes recognized virtue as the supreme end 
of human life; whatever is intermediate between virtue and vice was indifferent (ἀδιάφορον). 
Virtue is sufficient to secure happiness (Diog. L., VII. 11: αὐτάρκη δὲ τὴν ἀρετὴν πρὸς 
εὐδαιμονίαν, μηδενὸς προσδεομένην ὅτι μὴ Σωκρατικῆς ἰσχύος, τήν τ' ἀρετὴν τῶν ἔργων εἶναι, 
μήτε λόγων πλείστων δεομένην μήτε μαϑημάτων). Pleasure is pernicious. A frequent saying 
of Antisthenes (according to Diog. L., VI. 3) was: μανείην μᾶλλον ἢ ἡσθείην, “I would 
rather be mad than glad.” The good is beautiful, evil is hateful (ibid. 12). He who has 
once become wise and virtuous, can not afterward cease to be such (Diog. L., VI. 105: τὴν 
ἀρετὴν διδακτὴν εἶναι καὶ ἀναπόβλητον ὑπάρχειν: also in Xen., Mem., I. 2. 19: ὅτε οὐκ ἂν 
mote ὁ δίκαιος ἄδικος γένοιτο x. τ. 2., the principal reference is probably to Antisthenes). 
The good is proper to us (οἰκεῖον), the bad is something foreign (ξενικόν, ἀλλότριον, Diog. L.., 
VI. 12; Plat., Conviv., p. 205e; cf. Charmides, p. 163 c). 

No actual or possible form of government was pleasing to the Cynic. The Cynic 
restricts his sage to the subjective consciousness of his own virtue, isolating him from 
existing society, in order to make him a citizen of the world (Antisthenes, ap. Diog. Τὰ, 
VIL. 11: τὸν σοφὸν ov Kata τοὺς κειμένους νόμους πολιτεύσεσθαι, ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὸν τῆς ἀρετῆς. 
Ibid. 12; τῷ σοφῷ ξένον οὐδὲν οὐδ᾽ ἄπορον). He demands that men return to the simplicity 
of a natural state. Whether it is to this position of Antisthenes that Plato refers in his 
picture of a natural political state (Rep., II. 372 a)—which he yet terms a society of swine— 
and in his examination of the identification of the art of conducting men with the art of 
the shepherd (Polit., p. 2674-275 οὐ, is doubtful; perhaps in the latter passage the only 
veference is (as suggested by Henkel, Zur Gesch. der gr. Staatswiss, II., p. 22, Salzwedel, 


94 ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNIC SCHOOL. 


1866) to the Homeric idea of the ποιμὴν λαῶν, ‘shepherd of the people,” which appears in 
various passages of Xenophon’s Memor. and Cyrop. (cf. Politicus, p. 301 d, and Rep., VII. 
p. 520 b, with Xen., Cyrop., V.1, 24, with reference to the comparison of the human ruler 
with the queen-bee). That Antisthenes can not have anticipated Plato in the doctrine of 
the community of women and children, follows from Arist., Pol., II. 4, 1, where it is affirmed 
that Plato first proposed this innovation. 

The religious faith of the people, according to the Cynics, is as little binding on the sage 
as are their laws. Says Cicero (De Nat. Deorum, I. 13, 32): Antisthenes in eo libro qui 
physicus inscribitur, populares deos mulios, naturalem unum esse (dicit). The one God is not 
known through images. Virtue is the only true worship. Antisthenes interpreted the 
Homeric poems allegorically and in accordance with his philosophy. 

Diogenes of Sinope, through his extreme exaggeration of the principles of his teacher, 
developed a personality that is even comical. He is said himself not to have repelled the 
epithet ‘‘ Dog,” which was applied to him, but only to have replied that he did not, like 
other dogs, bite his enemies, but only his friends, in order that he might save them. He 
was also called “Socrates raving ” (Σωκράτης μαινόμενος). With the immorality of the times 
he rejected also its morality and culture. As tutor of the sons of Xeniades, at Corinth, he 
proceeded not without skill, on the principle of conformity to nature, in a manner similar 
to that demanded in modern times by Rousseau. He acquired the enduring love and 
respect of his pupils and of their father (Diog. L., VI. 30 seq., 74 seq.). Diog. L. (VI. 80) 
cites the titles of many works ascribed to Diogenes, but says that Sosicrates and Satyrus 
pronounced them all spurious. Diogenes designates, as the end to which all effort should 
tend, εὐψυχία καὶ τόνος ψυχῆς (in opposition to mere physical force, Stob., Florileg., 
VII. 18). Of the disciples of Diogenes, Crates of Thebes, a contemporary of Theophrastus 
the Aristotelian, is the most important (Diog. L., VI. 86 seq.); through his influence Hip- 
parchia and her brother Metrocles were won over to Cynicism. Monimus the Syracusan 
was also a pupil of Diogenes. Menippus of Sinope, who seems to have lived in the third 
century before Christ, and is mentioned by Lucian (Bis Accus., 33) as ‘‘ one of the an- 
cient dogs who barked a great deal” (cf. Diog. L., 99 seq.), was probably one of the 
earlier Cynics. There were probably several Cynics who bore the name Menippus. 

Cynicism, in its later days, degenerated more and more into insolence and indecency. 
It became ennobled, on the other hand, in the Stoic philosophy, through the recognition 
and attention given to mental culture. The Cynic’s conception of virtue is imperfect from 
its failure to determine the positive end of moral activity, so that at last nothing remained 
but ostentatious asceticism. ‘'The Cynics excluded themselves from the sphere in which 
is true freedom ” (Hegel). 

After Cynicism had for a long time been lost in Stoicism—which (as Zeller happily 
expresses it) ‘‘ gave to the doctrine of the independence of the virtuous will the basis of a 
comprehensive, scientific theory of the universe, and so adapted the doctrine itself more 
fully to the requirements of nature and human life ””—it was renewed in the first century 
after Christ under the form of a mere preaching of morals. But it was accompanied in 
this phase of its existence by much empty, ostentatious display of staves and wallets, of 
uncut beards and hair, and ragged cloaks. Of the better class of Cynics in this later 
period were Demetrius, the friend of Seneca and of Thrasea Petus, (Enomaus of Gadara 
(in the time of Hadrian), who (according to Euseb., Praeparat. Evang., V. 18 seq.) attacked 
the system of oracles with special violence, and Demonax of Cyprus (praised by Lucian, 
born about A. ν. 50, died about 150), who, though holding fast to the moral and religious 
principles of Cynicism, advocated them rather with a Socratic mildness than with the 
vulgar Cynic rudeness. 


ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAIC SCHOOL. 95 


§ 38. Aristippus of Cyrene, the founder of the Cyrenaic or He- 
donic school, and termed by Aristotle a Sophist, sees in pleasure, 
which he defines as the sensation of gentle motion, the end of life. 
The sage aims to enjoy pleasure, without being controlled by it. 
Intellectual culture alone fits one for true enjoyment. No one kind 
of pleasure is superior to another; only the degree and duration of 
pleasure determines its worth. We can know only our sensations, 
not that which causes them. 

The most eminent members of the Cyrenaic school were Arete, 
the daughter of Aristippus, and her son, Aristippus the younger, 
surnamed the ‘“ mother-taught” (μητροδίδακτος), who first put the 
doctrine of Hedonism into systematic form, and was probably the 
author of the comparison of the three sensational conditions of 
trouble, pleasure, and indifference, to tempest, gentle wind, and sea- 
calm, respectively ; also Theodorus, surnamed the Atheist, who 
taught that the particular pleasure of the moment was indifferent, 
and that constant cheerfulness was the end sought by the true sage, 
and his scholars Bio and Euhemerus, who explained the belief in the 
existence of gods as having begun with the veneration of distin- 
guishcd men; further, Hegesias, surnamed the “death-counseling ” 
(πεισιθάνατος), -- “10 accepted the avoidance of trouble as the highest 
attainable good, despaired of positive happiness, and considered life 
to be intrinsically valueless,—and Anniceris (the younger), who again 
made the feeling of pleasure the end of life, but included in his 
system, in addition to idiopathic pleasure, the pleasure of sympathy, 
and demanded a partial sacrifice of the former to the latter. 


The Cyrenaics are treated of, and the fragments of their writings are brought together in Mullach’s 
Fragm. Ph. Gr., UL. pp. 397-438. 

Amadeus Wendt, De philosophia Cyrenaica, Gott. 1841; Henr. de Stein, De philosophia Cyrenaica, 
Part I.: De vita Aristippi, Gott. 1855 (ef. his Gesch. des Platonismus, 11. Gott. 1864, pp. 60-64), 

On Aristippus, cf. C. M. Wieland, Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen, 4 vols., Leipsic, 1800-1802 ; 
J. F. Thrige, De Aristippo philosopho Cyrenaico aliisque Cyrenaicis, in his Res Cyrenensiwm, Copenh. 
1628. 

There exist early monographs on individual members of the Cyrenaic school, one, in particular, on 
Arete, by J. G. Eck (Leipsic, 1776), and another on Hegesias πεισιθάνατος, by J. J. Rambach (Quedlin- 
burg, 1771). The fragments of the tepa ἀναγραφή of Euhemerus have been collected by Wesseling (in 
Diod. Sic. Bibl. Hist., tom. IL, p. 623 seq.) Of Euhemerus, with special reference to Ennius, who shared 
in his views, Krahner treats in his Grundlinien zur Gesch. des Verfails der 16m. Staatsreligion (G.- 
Progr.), Halle, 1837; ef. also Ganss, Quaestiones Huhemereae (G@.-Pr.), Kempen, 1860, and Otto Sieroka, De 
Euhemero (Diss. Inaug.), Konigsberg, 1869. 


Aristippus of Cyrene was led by the fame of Socrates to seek his acquaintance, and 
joined himself permanently to the circle of Socrates’ disciples. In criticism of an (oral) 
utterance of Plato, which he thought to have been too confidently delivered, he is reported 
to have appealed to the more modest manner of Socrates (Arist., Rhet., 11. 23, p. 1398 b, 29: 


96 ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAIC SCHOOL. 


᾿Αρίστιππος πρὸς Πλάτωνα ἐπαγγελτικώτερόν τι εἰπόντα ὡς ῴετο- ἀλλὰ μὴν 6 γ᾽ ἑταῖρος ἡμῶν͵ 
ἔφη, οὐδὲν τοιοῦτοι", λέγων τὸν Σωκράτην). Perhaps, before the period of his intercourse with 
Socrates he had become familiar with the philosophy of Protagoras, of whose influence his 
doctrine shows considerable traces. The customs of his rich and luxurious native city 
were most likely of the greatest influence in determining him to the love of pleasure. That 
he, together with Cleombrotus, was absent in Aigina at the time of Socrates’ death, is 
remarked by Plato (Phaedo, 59 c), obviously with reproachful intent. Aristippus is said to 
have sojourned often at the courts of the elder and younger Dionysii in Sicily; several 
~ anecdotes are connected with his residence there and his meeting with Plato, which, though 
historically uncertain, are at least not unhappily invented, and illustrate the accommo- 
dating servility of the witty Hedonist, occasionally in contrast with the uncompromising 
Parrhesia of the rigid moralist and idealist (Diog. L., II. 78 et αἰ... Aristippus seems to 
have taught in various places, and particularly in his native city. He first, among the 
companions of Socrates, imitated the Sophists in demanding payment for his instructions 
(Diog. L., II. 65). It is perhaps for this reason, but probably also on account of his doc- 
trine of pleasure and his contempt for pure science, that Aristotle calls him a Sophist 
(Metaph., 111. 2). 

According to the suppositions of H. von Stein (in the work cited above), Aristippus 
was born about 435 8. c., resided in Athens during a series of years commencing with 416, 
in 399 was in A‘gina, in 389-388 was with Plato at the court of the elder Dionysius, and 
in 361 with the same at the court of the younger Dionysius, and, finally, after 356 was, 
apparently, again in Athens. Von Stein remarks, however (Gesch. des Platonismus, IL., 
p. 61), on the uncertainty of the accounts on which these dates are founded. According 
to Diog. L., II. 83, Aristippus was older than A¢schines. 

The fundamental features of the Cyrenaic doctrine are certainly due to Aristippus. 
Xenophon (Memor., II. 1) represents him as discussing them with Socrates; Plato refers 
probably to them in Rep., VI. 505 Ὁ (perhaps also in Gorg., 491 6, seq.), and most fully in 
the Philebus, although Aristippus is not there named. But the systematic elaboration of 
his doctrines seems to have been the work of his grandson, Aristippus μητροδίδακτος. 
Aristotle names, as representing the doctrine of pleasure (th. Nic., X.2), not Aristippus, 
but Eudoxus. 

The principle of Hedonism is described in the dialogue Philebus, p. 66 c, in these words: 
τἀγαθὸν ἐτίθετο ἡμῖν ἡδονὴν εἶναι πᾶσαν καὶ παντελῆ. Pleasure is the sensation of gentle 
motion (Diog. L., II. 85: τέλος ἀπέφαινε (Ἀρίστιππος) τὴν λείαν κίνησιν εἰς αἴσθησιν ἀναδιδο- 
μένην). Violent motion produces pain, rest or very slight motion, indifference, That all 
pleasure belongs to the category of things becoming (γένεσις) and not to that of things 
being (οὐσία), is mentioned by Plato in the dialogue Philebus (p. 53 ¢, ef. 42 d) as the correct 
observation of certain “elegants” (κομψοῖ), among whom Aristippus is probably to he 
understood as included. Yet the opposing of γένεσις to οὐσία is certainly not to be ascribed 
to Aristippus, but only probably the reduction of pleasure to motion (κίνησις), from which 
Plato drew the above conclusion. No pleasure, says Aristippus, is as such bad, though it 
may often arise from bad causes, and no pleasure is different from another in quality or 
worth (Diog. L., ΤΙ. 87: μὴ διαφέρειν ἡδονὴν ἡδονῆς, cf. Phileb., p. 12d). Virtue is a good 
as a means to pleasure (Cic., De Offic., III. 33, 116). 

The Socratic element in the doctrine of Aristippus appears in the principle of sei/- 
determination directed by knowledge (the manner of life of the wise, says Aristippus, op. 
Diog. L., 68, would experience no change, though all existing laws were abrogated), and 
in the control of pleasure as a thing to be acquired through knowledge and culture. The 
Cynics sought for independence through abstinence from enjoyment, Aristippus through 


ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAIC SCHOOL. 97 


the control of enjoyment in the midst of enjoyment. Thus Aristippus is cited by Stob. 
(Flor., 11, 18) as saying that “not he who abstains, but he who enjoys without being car- 
ried away, is master of his pleasures.” Similarly, in Diog. L., Il. 75, Aristippus is said to 
have required his disciples ‘‘to govern, and not be governed by their pleasures.” And, 
accordingly, he is further said to have expressed his relation to Lais, by saying: ἔχω, οὐκ 
éyouat. In a similar sense Horace says (Hpist., J. 1,18): nune in Aristippi furtim prae- 
cepta relabor, et mihi res, non me rebus subjungere conor. The Cynic sage knows how to deal 
with himself, but Aristippus knows how to deal with men (Diog. L., VI. 6, 58; 11. 68, 102). 
To enjoy the present, says the Cyrenaic, is the true business of man; only the present is 
in our power. 

With the Hedonic character of the ethics of Aristippus corresponds, in his theory of 
cognition, the restriction of our knowledge to sensations. The Cyrenaics distinguished 
(according to Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VII. 91) τὸ πάθος and τὸ ἐκτὸς ὑποκείμενον καὶ TOY 
πάθους ποιητικόν (the affection, and the ‘ thing in itself” which is external to us and affects 
us); the former exists in our consciousness (τὸ πάθος ἡμῖν ἐστι φαινόμενον); of the “thing 
in itself,’ on the contrary, we know nothing, except that it exists. Whether the sensa- 
tions of other men agree with our own, we do not know; the affirmative is not proved by 
the identity of names employed. The subjectivism of the Protagorean doctrine of knowl- 
edge finds in these propositions its consistent completion. It is improbable that the 
motive of ethical Hedonism was contained in this logical doctrine ; that motive must rather 
be sought, in part, in the personal love of pleasure of Aristippus, and in part in the eude- 
monistic element in the moral speculations of Socrates, which contained certain germs, not 
only for the doctrine of Antisthenes, but also for that of Aristippus (see, in particular, 
Xenophon, Memorab., I. 6. 7, respecting καρτερεῖν in immediate connection with the ques- 
tion, ibid. I. 6. 8: τοῦ dé μὴ δουλεύειν γαστρὶ μηδὲ ὕπνῳ καὶ Aayveia οἴει τι ἄλλο αἰτιώτερον 
εἶναι ἢ τὸ ἕτερα ἔχειν τούτων ἡδίω. The essence of virtue lies, according to Socrates, in 
knowledge, in practical insight. But it is asked, what is the object of this insight? If 
the reply is, the Good, then the second question arises, in what the Good consists. If it 
consists in virtue itself, the definition moves in acircle. If in the useful, the useful is 
relative and its value is determined by that for which it is useful. But what is this last 
something, in whose service the useful stands? If Hudaemonia, then it must be stated in 
what the essence of Eudaemonia consists. The most obvious answer is: Pleasure, and 
this answer was given by Aristippus, while the Cynics found no answer not involving 
them in the circle, and so did not advance beyond their objectless insight and aimless 
asceticism. Plato’s answer was: the Idea of the Good (Rep., VI. p. 505). 

Later Cyrenaics (according to Sext. E., Adv. Math., VII. 11) divided their system of 
doctrines into five parts: 1) Concerning that which is to be desired and shunned (goods 
and evils, αἱρετὰ καὶ φευκτά); 2) Concerning the passions (7467); 3) Concerning actions 
(πράξεις); 4) Concerning natural causes (αἴτια); 5) Concerning the guaranties of truth 
(πίστεις). Hence it appears that these later Cyrenaics also treated the theory of knowledge, 
not as the foundation, but rather as the complement of ethics. 

As the control of pleasure aimed at by Aristippus was in reality incompatible with the 
principle that the pleasure of the moment is the highest good, some modifications in his 
doctrine could not but arise. Accordingly we find Theodorus ἄθεος (Diog. L, 11. 97 seq.), 
not, indeed, advancing to a principle specifically different from pleasure, but yet sub- 
stituting for the isolated sensation a state of constant cheerfulness (χαρά), as the ‘‘end” 
(τέλος). But mere reflection on our general condition is not sufficient to elevate us above 
the changes of fortune, since our general condition is not under our control, and so 
Hegesias πεισιθάνατος (Diog. L., II. 93 seq.) despaired altogether of attaining that result. 

1 


98 ῬΙΙΑΤΟ LIFE. 


Anniceris the Younger (ibid. 96 seq. ; Clem., Strom., II. 417 b.) sought to ennoble the Hedonic 
principle, by reckoning among the things which afford pleasure, friendship, thankfulness, 
and piety toward parents and fatherland, social intercourse, and the strife after honors; 
yet he declared all labor for the benefit of others to be conditioned on the pleasure which 
our good will brings to ourselves. Later, Epicureanism reigned in the place of the 
Cyrenaic doctrine. 

Euhemerus, who lived (300 8, 6.) at the court of Cassander, and favored the principles 
of the Cyrenaic school, exerted great influence by his work ἱερὰ avaypagh, in which 
(according to Cic., De Nat. Deorum, I. 42; Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., IX. 17, and others) he 
developed the opinion that the Gods (as also the Heroes) were distinguished men, to 
whom divine honors had been rendered after their death. In proof of this opinion he 
referred to the tomb of Zeus, which was then pointed out in Crete. It is indisputable 
that Euhemerism contains a partial truth, but unjustly generalized; not only historical 
events, but natural phenomena and ethical considerations, served as a basis for the myths 
of the Gods, and the form of the mythological conceptions of the ancients was conditioned 
on various psychological motives. The one-sided explanation of EKuhemerus strips the 
myths of the most essential part of their religious character. But for this very reason it 
found a more ready hearing at a time when the power of the ancient religious faith over 
the minds of men was gone, and in the last centuries of antiquity it was favored by many 
representatives of the new Christian faith. 


§ 39. Plato, born in Athens (or Agina) on the 7th of Thargelion, 
in the first year of the 88th Olympiad (May 26 or 27, 427 3. 0.) or 
perhaps on the 7th of Thargelion, Olymp. 87.4 (June 5 or 6, 428), and 
originally named Aristocles, was the son of Aristo and Perictione (or 
Potone). The former was a descendant of Codrus; the ancestor of 
Perictione was Dropides, a near relative of Solon, and she was cousin 
to Critias, who, after the unfortunate termination of the Pelopon- 
nesian war, became one of the Thirty oligarchical Tyrants. From 
Olymp. 93.1 till 95.1 (408 or 407 to 399 8. c.) Plato was a pupil of 
Socrates. After the condemnation of the latter, he went with others 
of Socrates’ disciples to Megara, to the house of Euclid. From there 
it is said that he undertook a long journey, in the course of which he 
visited Cyrene and Egypt, and perhaps Asia Minor, whence he seems 
to have returned to Athens; it is possible, however, that previous to 
this journey he had already returned to Athens and lived there a 
certain length of time. When he was about forty years old he visited 
the Pythagoreans in Italy, and went to Sicily, where he formed 
relations of friendship with Dio, the brother-in-law of the tyrant 
Dionysius I. Here, by his openness of speech, he so offended the 
tyrant, that the latter caused him to be sold as a prisoner of war in 
ZEgina, by Pollis, the Spartan embassador. Ransomed by Anniceris, 
he founded (387 or 386 8. c.) his philosophical school in the Academy. 
Plato undertook a second journey to Syracuse about 367 B. c., after 


PLATO’S LIFE. 99 


the death of the elder Dionysius, and a third in the year 361. The 
object of the second journey was to endeavor, in company with Dio, 
to bring the younger Dionysius, on whom the tyranny of his father 
had devolved, under the influence of his ethical and, so far as circum- 
stances permitted it, of his political theories. The object of the third 
was to effect a reconciliation between Dionysius and Dio. In each 
case he failed to accomplish the desired results. Henceforth he lived 
exclusively devoted to his occupation as a philosophical teacher until 
his death, which took place Olymp. 108.1 (848-347, probably in the 
second half of the Olympiadic year, near his birthday, hence in May 
or June, 347 8. ©.). 


Data relative to Plato’s life were recorded in antiquity by some of the immediate disciples of the 
philosopher, in particular by Speusippus (Πλάτωνος ἐγκώμιον, Diog. L., IV. 5; οὗ Πλάτωνος περίδειπνον, 
Diog. L., III. 2, cited also by Apuleius, De Habitudine Doctrinarum Plat.), Hermodorus (Simplic., Ad 
Arist. Phys., 54b, 56b; ef. Diog. L., II. 106; Ill. 6), Phillippus the Opuntian (Suidas, 8. A. v.), and 
Xenocrates (cited by Simplicius in the Scholia to Aristotle, ed. by Brandis, pp. 470a, 27, and 414 4, 12). 
Aristoxenus, the Peripatetic, also wrote a life of Plato (Diog. L., V. 85). Of later writers, Favorinus (in 
the time of Trajan and Hadrian) wrote περὶ Πλάτωνος, from which work Diogenes L. drew largely. All 
these works have been lost. The following are extant :— 

Apuleius Madaurensis, De doctrina et nativitate Platonis (in the Opera Apul. ed. Oudendorp, Ley- 
den, 1786; ed. G. F. Hildebrand, Leipsic, 1842, 1843). 

Diogenes Laértius, De Vita et Doctr. Philos. (see above). Book JII. is entirely given to Plato; 
§§ 1-45 treat of his life. 

Olympiodori Vita Platonis (in several of the complete editions of Plato’s works, also in Didot's 
edition of Diog. L., and in the Βιογράφοι, ed. Westermann, Brunswick, 1845). This Vita forms the begin- 
ning of the Προλεγόμενα τῆς Πλάτωνος φιλοσοφίας, ed. K. F. Hermann, in the sixth volume of Hermann’s 
edition of Plato’s works. Cf. Theophil Roeper, Lectiones Abulpharagianae ailterae: de Honaini, ut 
JSertur, vita Plutonis (Pr.), Dantzic, 1861. 

More trustworthy than these and other late and unimportant compilations, is, in general (though not 
in all parts), the seventh of the Letters, which have come down to us under the name of Plato. This 
letter is indeed inauthentic, like all the others, and perhaps was not even composed by an immediate dis- 
ciple of Plato; but it dates from a comparatively early epoch, and was known to Aristophanes of Byzan- 
tium, by whom it must have been considered Platonic. Cf., besides other earlier investigations, in particular, 
Herm. Thom Karsten, De Platonis quae feruntur, epistolis, pruecipue tertia, septima, octava, Traj. ad 
Rhen., 1864, with whom, in his rejection of the authenticity of these letters, H. Sauppe agrees, in his review 
in the @dtt. Gel. Anzeigen, 1866, No. 23, pp. 881-892. Farther, many passages in Plato’s own writings, and 
in the works of Aristotle, Plutarch, and others, are important as furnishing data for the biography of Plato. 

Of modern works on the life of Plato, those most worthy of mention are: Marsilius Ficinus, Vita 
Platonis, prefixed to his translation of Plato’s writings. Remarks on the Life and Writings of Plato, 
Edinb. 1760; German translation with annotations and additions by K. Morgenstern, Leipsic, 1797. W. G. 
Tennemann, System der Platon. Philosophie, 4 vols., Leipsic, 1792-95. (The first volume begins with an 
account of Plato’s life.) Friedr. Ast, Plato’s Leben und Schriften, Leipsic, 1816. K. F. Hermann, 
Geschichte und System der Platonischen Philosophie, first part (the only one published), Heidelb. 1889. 
(Pages 1-126, ‘On Plato’s life and external relations; pp. 127-340, “ Plato’s predecessors and contempo- 
raries considered with reference to their influence on his doctrine;" pp. 841-718, ‘‘ Plato's literary 
works as authorities for the interpretation of his system, sifted and arranged”) George Grote, Plate 
and the other Companions of Socrates, London, 1865, 2d ed. 1867. A critique of the traditional accounts 
of the life of Plato, in which the same are represented as almost altogether unhistorical, or at least as 
almost wholly untrustworthy, is given by Heinrich von Stein, in Sieben Biicher zur Gesch. des Platonismus, 
Part II. (Gott. 1864), in Section 17, on “The biographical myth and the literary tradition” (pp. 158-197): 
Schaarschmidt adopts these results, and goes still farther in his work: Die Sammlung der Platonischen 
Schriften, Bonn, 1866, p. 61 seq. On the basis of the transmitted records accepted without critical sifting, 
E. Welper has written a novel (Plato und seine Zeit, hist.-biograph. Lebensbild, Cassel, 1866), the com- 
parison of which with the traditional accounts may assist one to a clearer intelligence of the way in which 


100 PLATO'S LIFE. 


given facts are accustomed to be enlarged upon under the influence of a too luxuriant inventive faculty, 
and so to a more correct estimation of the value of tradition itself. 

(Cf. the literature in §§ 40 and 41.) 

That Plato was born in Olymp. 88.1 (427 B. c., when Diotimus was Archon) is directly 
affirmed by Apollodorus, ἐν χρονικοῖς, ap. Diog. L., III. 2 (ὦ 6.,ὄ if by Olymp. 88 the first 
year of that Olympiad is to be understood); cf. also Hippol., Refut. Haer., 1.8. We are 
also conducted indirectly to this result by the statement of Hermodorus, an immediate 
disciple of Plato, given in Diog. L., 11. 106, and III. 6,—a statement which gives rise to 
doubts in its transmitted form (cf., among others, Schaarschmidt, in the work above cited, 
p. 66), but which is yet the most trustworthy of all the chronological statements relating to 
this subject, and probably forms the basis of the statement of Apollodorus. The purport 
of it is that Plato, at the age of twenty-eight years, soon after the execution of Socrates, 
went to Megara, to the house of Euclid. But Socrates drank the hemlock in the second 
half of the month of Thargelion, Olymp. 95.1 (in May or June, 399 B. c.). For the year 
429 (87.3, the year when Apollodorus was Archon) as the year of Plato’s birth, we 
have the evidence of Athenzeus (Deipnosoph., V. 17, p. 217); for 428, we have the state- 
ment in Diog. L., III. 3, that Plato was born in the same Archontic year in which Pericles 
died (ὦ ¢., in the second half of the archonship of Epameinon, Ol. 87.4 = 429-428, in the 
first half of which Pericles died), and also the statement (Pseudo-Plutarch., Vit. Isocr.. 2, 
p. 836), that Isocrates was born seven years before Plato—assuming it to be established 
that Isocrates was born in Olymp. 86.1 (436-435 B.c.). That Plato was born on the 7th of 
Thargelion (Diog. L., III. 2) seems likewise to rest on the authority of Apollodorus, so 
that if the celebration of Plato’s birth was transferred to this day on account of its being 
the birthday of the Delian Apollo, the change must have been made by the Academics 
soon after Plato’s death. This day, in the Olympiadic year 88.1, included—if Boeckh is 
correct in assuming that the octennial cycle was then in vogue at Athens—the time from 
the evening of May 26th to the evening of May 27th, 427 8. ©. (or, if the Metonic cycle had 
already been adopted, May 29-30). Plato’s birthplace was Athens, or, according to some, 
Afigina, whither his father had gone as a Kleruch (Diog. L., III. 3). 

The following table represents the genealogy of Plato, so far as it is known to us (see 
Charm., 154 seq., Tim., 20d, Apol., 24a, De Rep., init., Parm., init., et al.):— 


Δρωπίδης, a relative of Σόλων. 
Κριτίας. 


Κάλλαισχρος. Τλαύκων. ᾿Αριστοκλῆς. ᾿Αντιφῶν. 


Κριτίας. Χαρμίδης. Περικτιόνη married 1) with ᾿Αρίστων, 2) with Πυριλάμπης. 


Αδείμαντος. Πλάτων. Τλαύκων. Ποτώνη. ᾿Αντιφῶν. 


Σπεύσιππος. 


PLATO’S LIFE. 101 


It should be remarked that the second marriage of Perictione and the existence of 
Antiphon are facts known only on the evidence of the dialogue Parmenides—whose genu- 
ineness is, to say the least, very doubtful, and whose historical statements are therefore 
not to be taken as positively trustworthy—and on that of later writers (especially Plu- 
tarch), whose only authority was this dialogue. Pyrilampes appears, from Charm., 158 a, 
to have been an uncle of the mother of Perictione. 

Plato received his early education from teachers of repute. Dionysius (who is men- 
tioned in the spurious dialogue Anterastae) is reported to have instructed him in reading 
and writing; Aristo of Argos, in gymnastics (Diog. L., III. 4), and Draco, a pupil of Damon, 
and Metellus (or Megillus) of Agrigentum, in music (Plutarch, De Mus., 17). The report: 
concerning Aristo (who is said to have given to his pupil the name of Plato) seems to be 
historical; the others are more doubtful. Plato is said to have taken part in several 
military campaigns. By Athenian law he would be required to perform military service 
from his eighteenth year (409 B. c.). According to Aristoxenus (ap. Diog. L., III. 8) he 
was engaged at Tanagra, Corinth, and Delium—an account which is unhistorical if refer- 
ence is intended to the well-known battles at Tanagra and Delium; but perhaps it alludes 
to minor engagements in the years 409-405. In the battle at Corinth (394) Plato may 
have taken part. Perhaps, like his brothers, he was present and participated in an 
encounter which took place near Megara in the year 409 (Rep., II. p. 368; Diod. Sic., 
XIII. 65). The poetical essays of his youth were discontinued after he became more 
intimately acquainted with Socrates. Before that time he had been already instructed in 
the Heraclitean philosophy by Cratylus (Arist., Metaph., I. 6). The intimacy of Socrates 
with Critias and Charmides may have led early to Plato’s acquaintance with him; the 
philosophical intercourse of Plato with Socrates began, according to Diog. L. (III. 6), who, 
perhaps, follows the authority of Hermodorus, in Plato’s twentieth year. A young man, 
endowed with a luxuriant fancy, he received the logical discipline to which Socrates sub- 
jected him as a kindness worthy of all gratitude; the moral force of Socrates’ character 
filled him with awe, and the steadfastness with which he suffered death for the cause of 
truth and justice, finally transfigured, in his mind, into a pure ideal, the image of his 
master. We may assume that, while Plato was associated with Socrates, he also familiar- 
ized himself with other philosophical systems. But whether he had at that time already 
conceived the leading traits of his own system, founded on the theory of ideas, is uncer- 
tain; certain historical indications are wanting in regard to this subject. Nevertheless, 
the Aristotelian account of the genesis of the theory of ideas from Heraclitean and Socratic 
doctrines (see below, § 41) makes it very probable that Plato had this theory already in 
his mind during the period of his personal intercourse with Socrates; the doctrine of 
Kuclid, the Megarian, may also have had its influence on him at the same period. Re- 
specting the precise character of the intercourse between Socrates and Plato, we have no 
specific accounts. Xenophon (who recounts conversations of Socrates with Aristippus and 
Antisthenes) mentions Plato only once (Mem., III. 6. 1), where he says that for his sake, 
as also for that of Charmides, Socrates was well-disposed toward Glaucon. According to 
Plat., Apol., p. 34 ἃ, 38 Ὁ, Plato was present at the trial of Socrates, and announced him- 
self as ready to guarantee the payment of any fine; according to Phaedo, 59b, he was ill 
on the day of Socrates’ death, and was thereby hindered from being present at the last 
conversations of his master. 

Plato found his life’s vocation, not in participating in the political contests of the parties 
then existing at Athens, but in founding a philosophical school. This task demanded the 
unconditional application of his undivided powers, and in the execution of it Plato accom- 
plished a work infinitely more advantageous for humanity than any which he could have 


109 PLATO'S LIFE. 


accomplished if he had chosen rather to exercise the civic virtues of a patriotic popular 
orator. Plato could consecrate himself to no political activity which failed to correspond 
with the sense and spirit of his philosophical principles. He could not, like Demosthenes, 
exhort the Athenians to maintain their democracy and to guard themselves against a 
foreign monarch, because democracy did not appear to him a good form of government; 
he could only consent to co-operate for the establishment of an aristocracy or a monarchy 
founded upon the philosophical education of the ruling class, for only a political activity 
directed to this end could seem to him useful or obligatory. A work of this latter kind he 
did once undertake, when the state of things in Sicily appeared to him (erroneously, it is 
true) favorable to the solution of the political problem as he conceived it. Cf Ferd. Del- 
briick, Vertheidigung Plato’s gegen einen Angriff (Niebuhr’s, in the Rh. Mus. fiir Philol., 
Gesch. u. griech. Philos., I. p. 196) auf seine Birgertugend, Bonn, 1828. 

It is possible that the intercourse of Plato with Euclid of Megara also exercised a 
considerable influence on the formation of his own system. Whether Plato, after his 
sojourn with Euclid, next lived in Athens, and in the year 394 participated in the 
Corinthian campaign, is uncertain. He is said, when at Cyrene, to have visited Theodorus, 
the mathematician (Diog. L., IIT. 6), whose acquaintance he seems to have made at Athens 
shortly before the death of Socrates (Theaet., p. 143 b, seq.); he remained, as we are credibly 
informed, a certaifi time at Cyrene, perfecting himself in mathematics under the direction 
of Theodorus. According to Cic., De Fin., V. 29, Plato went to Egypt for the purpose of 
obtaining instruction from the priests in mathematics and astronomy, in which particular his 
example was followed by his pupil, Hudoxus, the astronomer, who for a considerable period 
took up his residence in Egypt, the land of ancient experiences. Itis uncertain whether the 
accounts of Plato’s visits to Cyrene and Egypt are historical or legendary. Their only basis 
may have been Plato’s mention of Theodorus (in the Theaetetus) and the references to Egypt 
in Plato’s works (Phaedr., p. 241 ο; Rep., 1V.435; Tim., 21 6; Leges, 11. 656d, 657 a, V. 747 ο, 
VII. 799 a, 819 a; cf. Pol., 264 ο, 290d). But even admitting this, the inference in favor, 
at least, of a journey to Egypt, has strong support. From the picture given by Plato of 
the Heracliteans in Ionia (Theaet., 179 seq.), Schleiermacher (Pl. W., II. 1, p. 185) infers that 
he had probably been in Asia Minor; but other evidence for this conclusion is wanting. 
Plutarch, in the dialogue De genio Socratis (περὶ τοῦ Σωκράτους δαιμονίου), ο. 7, p. 579, 
represents Simmias as saying: ‘At Memphis, the home of the prophet Χόνουφις, we 
remained for atime philosophizing, Plato and ‘EAjoriwy and I. When we had started 
on our return from Egypt, we were met near Caria by certain Delians, who requested 
from Plato, as a man acquainted with geometry, the solution of the problem proposed to 
them by Apollo, viz.: how to double a cubiform altar. Plato indicated as a condition of 
the solution of the problem, that they must find two mean proportionals, and directed the 
petitioners, for the rest, to Eudoxus of Cnidos and Helicon of Cyzicum. He also instructed 
them that the god demanded not so much the altar, as that they should occupy themselves 
with the study of mathematics.” But this narrative can not be regarded as historical; the 
whole dialogue is interspersed with free inventions from Plutarch’s hand. Plato seems to 
have gone to Italy and Sicily (about 390?) from Athens (Zpist., VII. p.326b, seq.). It is 
uncertain whether he was at Athens about 394 B. c. and took part in the Corinthian cam- 
paign. On the occasion of his first arrival at Syracuse, he was, according to the 7th Letter 
(p. 324b), about forty years old. Among the Pythagoreans Plato probably sought to 
acquire, not only a more exact knowledge of their doctrine, but also a view of their scientific, 
ethical, and political life in common, and their manner of educating their youth. At Syracuse 
he won over to his doctrines and to his theory of life, the youthful Dio, then about twenty 
years old, whose sister was married to Dionysius (the elder); but the tyrant himself 


PLATO’S LIFE. 103 


thought Plato’s admonitions “senile” (Diog. L., III. 18), and revenged himself on him by 
treating him asa prisoner of war. The sale of Plato at Adgina (in case it is historical) 
must have taken place shortly before the end of the Corinthian war, 387 B.c. Anniceris 
is reported to have ransomed him and afterward to have refused to allow the friends of 
Plato to make up to him the price of the ransom, and so, as the story goes, the sum was 
applied to the purchase of the garden of the Academy, where Plato united around him a circle 
of friends devoted to philosophy. His instructions, as we must infer from the form of his 
writings and from an express declaration in the Phaedrus (p. 275 seq.), were generally con- 
veyed in the form of dialogues ; yet he seems, besides, to have delivered connected lectures. 
Nothing but the hope of attaining an important political and philosophical result (Zpist., 
VII., p. 329) could determine Plato twice to interrupt his scholastic activity by journeys 
to Sicily. The object of Plato in undertaking his second journey to Sicily, not long 
after the accession of the younger Dionysius to power (367 B. c.), was to unite with Dio in 
an attempt to win over the young ruler to philosophy, and to move him to transform his 
tyranny into a legally-ordered monarchy. This plan was frustrated through the fickle- 
ness of the youth, his suspicion that Dio wished to get him out of the way in order to 
possess himself of supreme power, and the counter-efforts of a political party, who 
sought to maintain the existing form of government unchanged. Dio was banished, and 
Plato was left without influence. He undertook his third journey to S?cily in the hope of 
effecting a reconciliation between Dionysius and Dio. Not only did he fail to accomplish 
this result, but his own life came at last into danger through the mistrust of the tyrant, 
the intercession of the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum being all that saved it. Dio, 
supported by friends and pupils of Plato, undertook in Olymp. 105.3 (358-57) a successful 
expedition to Sicily against Dionysius, but was murdered in 353 by a traitor among his 
companions in arms, Callippus (who was himself put to death in 350). Dionysius, who had 
asserted his power successfully in Locri in Italy, was restored, in 346, to power in Syra- 
cuse, until, in 343, he was driven out by Timoleon. Returning to Athens (in 361 or 360), 
Plato resumed his doctrinal labors both orally and in writing. According to Dionys., De 
Compos. Verb., p. 208, Plato labored till into his eightieth year in perfecting his writings. 
An account, perhaps based on numerical speculations, and reported by Seneca (Hpist., 58. 
31), represents him as having died on his birthday, at the exact age of eighty-one years. 
Cicero says (De Senect., V.13): uno et octogesimo anno scribens est mortuus, by which he may 
mean that Plato had just entered upon his eighty-first year. He died in the year when 
Theophilus was Archon (Olymp. 108.1). 

In his “School of Athens,” Raphael (as he is commonly interpreted—another interpreta- 
tion is given by H. Grimm, Neue Essays, cf. Preuss. Jahrb., 1864, Nos. 1 and 2) represents 
Plato as pointing toward heaven, while Aristotle turns his regards upon the earth. In the 
spirit of this representation, Goethe characterizes Plato as follows: “ Plato’s relation to the 
world is that of a superior spirit, whose good pleasure it is to dwell in it fora time. It is 
not so much his concern to become acquainted with it—for the world and its nature are 
things which he presupposes—as kindly to communicate to it that which he brings with 
him, and of which it stands in so great need. He penetrates into its depths, more that he 
may replenish them from the fullness of his own nature, than that he may fathom their 
mysteries. He scales its heights as one yearning after renewed participation in the source 
of his being. All that he utters has reference to something eternally complete, good, 
true, beautiful, whose furtherance he strives to promote in every bosom. Whatever of 
earthly knowledge he appropriates here and there, evaporates in his method and in his 
discourse.” Cf. below, § 45, Goethe’s characterization of Aristotle. ‘In Plato’s phi- 
losophy,” says Boeckh, “the expanding roots and branches of earlier philosophy are 


104 PLATO’S WRITINGS. 


developed into the full blossom, out of which the subsequent fruit was slowly brought 
to maturity.” 


§ 40. As works of Plato, thirty-six compositions (in fifty-six books) 
have been transmitted to us (the “ Epistles” being counted as one); 
beside these, several works, which in ancient times were already 
designated as spurious, bear his name. The Alexandrian gram- 
marian, Aristophanes of Byzantium, arranged several of the Platonic 
writings in Trilogies, and the Neo-Pythagorean Thrasyllus (in the 
time of the Emperor Tiberius) arranged all those which he considered 
genuine in nine Tetralogies. Schleiermacher assumes that Plato 
composed all his works (with the exception of a few occasional com- 
positions) in a didactic order. This would necessarily presuppose a 
plan, of which the outlines were conceived and fixed at the begin- 
ning. Schleiermacher divides the works into three groups: ele- 
mentary, mediatory or preparatory, and constructive dialogues. As 
Plato’s first composition he names the PAaedrus, as his latest writ- 
ings, the Republic, Timaeus, and the Laws. K. Τὶ, Hermann, on the 
other hand, denies this unity of literary plan, and considers the 
writings of Plato separately as documents exponential of his own 
philosophical development. He assumes three “literary periods” in 
the life of Plato, the first reaching to the time immediately following 
the death of Socrates, the second covering the time of Plato’s resi- 
dence at Megara and of the journeys which he made directly after- 
ward, and the third beginning with the return of Plato to Athens 
after his first journey to Sicily and extending to the time of his death. 
The earliest compositions of Plato were, according to him, the shorter 
ethical dialogues which most bear a Socratic type, such as Hippias 
Minor, Lysis, and the Protagoras ; in designating the latest he agrees 
with Schleiermacher. He styles the Phaedrus (with Socher and 
Stallbaum) the “inaugural programme of Plato’s doctrinal activity at 
the Academy.” Ed. Munk judges that Plato intended in his writings 
to draw an idealized picture of the life of Socrates as the genuine 
philosopher, and that he indicated their order through the increasing 
age of Socrates in the successive dialogues. This view is incom- 
patible with Hermann’s principle, but, on the hypothesis of a single 
plan held in view from the beginning, is very plausible, though not 
the only possible view ; it is, however, incapable of being maintained 
throughout without the aid of excessively violent suppositions. 

In any case, the point of departure in inquiring into the genuine- 


PLATO'S WRITINGS. 105 


ness of the Platonic writings must be the passages in Aristotle in 
which these are alluded to. Judged by this standard, the works best 
attested as belonging to Plato are the Republic, Timaeus, and the 
Laws, all of which are mentioned in Aristotle by their titles, with 
Plato’s name. Next to these come, judged by the same standard, 
the Phaedo, the Banquet (cited under the title of “ Erotic Dis- 
courses”), Phaedrus, and Gorgias, which are mentioned by Aris- 
totle by their titles, and with evident reference to Plato as their 
author, although he is not expressly named. The eno, Hippias 
(meaning Lippias Minor), and Menexenus (cited as the “ Epitaphic ” 
Discourse), are mentioned by Aristotle by their titles as extant, but 
not, apparently, with unquestionable reference to Plato as their 
author. Aristotle refers to passages in the 7heaetetus and the Phile- 
bus, which he cites as Plato’s works, but without naming these titles ; 
he also refers to doctrines contained in the Sophistes, but which 
seem rather to be cited as oral deliverances of Plato or (in some in- 
stances) as the doctrines of Plato’s disciples. Without naming Plato 
or the titles, Aristotle appears also to refer to passages in the Polzt- 
icus, the Apologia, Lysis, Laches, and perhaps the Protagoras ; 
possibly also to passages in the Huthydemus and the Cratylus. Re- 
specting the time of the composition of the dialogues, only a few data 
ean be found which are fully certain. From an anachronism in the 
Banquet, it appears beyond question that that dialogue was written 
after (and probably very soon after) 385 B.c., and it is expressly 
stated by Aristotle that the Zaws were composed later than the 
Republic. In view of the idealizing character of the Platonic dia- 
logues, the only natural supposition is that Plato wrote none of them 
until after the death of Socrates. According to an ancient and not 
improbable, but also not sufticiently well-authenticated account, the 
dialogue Phaedrus was the earliest of Plato’s compositions. It is 
a matter of question whether the Protagoras and Gorgias preceded 
or followed the Phaedrus, but we may assume that the Phaedrus 
was composed before the Banquet. It is most probable that Plato 
began to write his dialogues in about his fortieth year, on the occasion 
of the founding of his school in the garden of the Academy, and in the 
following order: Phaedrus, Banquet, Protagoras, together with a num- 
ber of shorter ethical dialogues, Gorgias, and then perhaps Meno; 
these dialogues were perhaps immediately followed by the Lepubiic, 
together with the Zimaeus and the Critias fragment, then by the 


106 PLATO’S WRITINGS. 


Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Philebus, and Laws, which latter Plate 
is said to have left unfinished. The Apology appears to have been 
written soon after the trial of Socrates and in substantial agreement 
with his actual defense. 


The works of Plato were published first in Latin in the translation of Marsilius Ficinus, Florence, 
1483-1484, reprinted at Venice, 1491, etc. In Greek, they were first published at Venice, in 1518, by Aldus 
Manutius (with the co-operation of Marcus Masurus). This edition was followed by the edition of 
Johannes Oporinus and Simon Grynaeus, Bastleae apud Joh. Valderwm, 1584. Then came the edition 
Basileae apud Henricum Petri, 1556, and afterward that of Henricus Stephanus, with the translation of 
Joh. Serranus, 3 vols., Par. 1578. The paging and side-numbers of this edition are printed in all modern 
editions, and are those usually followed in citation. The edition of Stephanus was reproduced at Lyons, 
1590, with the translation of Ficinus, and also, in Greek alone, at Frankfort, 1602. Subsequent complete 
editions are the edition published at Zweibriicken, in 1781-87 (instituted by the so-called Bipontines, 6. Ch. 
Croll, Fr. Chr. Exter, and J. Val. Embser, and to which belong the Argumenta dial. Plat. expos. et ill. a. 
D. Tiedemanno, Zweibr., 1786), the Tauchnitz edition, edited by Chr. Dan. Beck (Leipsic, 1813-19, 1829 
and 1850), and the editions of Bekker (Berlin, 1816-17, with Commentary and Scholia, 7j¢d. 1823, and Lon- 
don, 1826), Ast (Leipsic, 1819-32), Gottfr. Stallbaum (Leipsic, 1821-25; 1883 seq., and in one vol., Leipsic, 
1850 and 1867), and Baiter, Orelli, and Winckelmann (Zurich, 1889-42; 1861 seq.); Greek and German 
edition, Leipsic, 1841 seq., Greek and Latin edition, ed. by Ch. Schneider and R. B. Hirschig, Par. 1846-56, 
Greek alone, ed. K. F. Hermann, Leipsic, 1851-53. 

Platon’s Werke, by F. Schleiermacher (Translations and Introductions), I. 1 and 2, 11. 1-8, Berlin, 
1804-10; new and improved edition, ἐδέα. 1817-24; III. 1 (Republic), ibid. 1828; 8d ed. of I. and II. and 
2d ed. of III. 1, ἐδέα. 1855-62. [Schleiermacher’s Introductions.to the Dialogues of Plato, translated by 
W. Dobson, Cambridge and London, 1836.—7?r.] wores de Platon, French translation by Victor Cousin, 
8 vols., Paris, 1825-40. Translated into Italian by Rug. Bonghi, Opere di Platone nuovamente tradotte, 
Milan, 1857. Platon’s Sdémmtliche Werke, translated by Hieron. Miller, with introductions by Karl Stein- 
hart, 8 vols., Leipsic, 1850-66. (Cf. Steinhart’s Aphorismen iiber den gegenwartigen Stand der Pl. For- 
schungen, in the Verh. der 25. Philol.- Vers. in Halle, Leipsic, 1868, pp. 54-70.) [There are two complete 
translations of the works of Plato in English: The Works of Plato (with notes, abstract of Greek Com- 
mentaries, etc.—nine of the dialogues translated by F. Sydenham), by Thomas Taylor, 5 vols., London, 1504; 
and Plato (in Bohn’s Classical Library), translated by Cary, Davis, and Burges, 6 vols., London, 1852 seq. ; 
ef. Summary and Analysis of the Dialogues of Plato, by Alfred Day (Bohn’s L.), London, 1870.—77r.] 

For ancient Commentaries on Plato, see below §§ 65, 70. Timaei Lewicon voc. Platonic., ed. D. 
Ruhnken, Leyden, 1789, it. ed., cur. G. A. Koch, Leipsic, 1828. For the works of Ast and K. F. Hermann 
on Plato, see above, § 39; ef. also Ast’s Lexicon Platonicwm, Leipsic, 1884-39. Jos. Socher, Ueber Platon’s 
Schriften, Munich, 1820. Ed. Zeller, Platonische Studien (on the Leges, Menexenus, Hippias Minor, Par- 
menides, and on Aristotle’s representation of the Platonic philosophy), Tibingen, 1839. Franz Susemihl, 
Prodromus Plat. Forschungen ( Greifsw. Hab.-Schr.), Gott. 1852. By the same, Die genet. Entwickelung 
der Platon. Philosophie, einleitend dargestelit, 2 parts, Leipsic, 1855-60. Cf. his numerous reviews of 
modern works on Plato, in several volumes of Jahn’s Jahrbiicher f. Phi. αι. Pdd., and his original articles 
in the same review and in the Philologus, especially his Platonische Forschungen in the second supple- 
mentary volume to the Phélologus, 1863, and in the Philologus, Vol. XX., Gétt., 1863, and also the intro- 
ductions to his translations of several of Plato’s dialogues. Εἰ. F. W. Suckow, Die wiss. und kimstlerische 
Form der Platonischen Schriften in ihrer bisher verdorgenen Higenthiimlichkeit dargestellt, Berlin, 
1855. Ed. Munk, Die natiirliche Ordnung der Platonischen Schriften, Berlin, 1856. Sigurd Ribbing, 
Genetisk framstdlining af Plato's ideelara jemte bifogade undersikningar om de Platonska skrifternas 
dkthet och indérdes sammanhang, Upsala, 1858, in German, Leipsic, 1863-64. H. Bonitz, Platon, Studien, 
Vols. I. and II. (on the Gorg., Theaet., Huthyd., and Soph.), Vienna, 1858-60; Friedrich Ueberweg, Unter- 
suchungen tiber die Echtheit und Zeitfolge Platonischer Schriften und tiber die Hauptmomente aus 
Plato's Leben, Vienna, 1861; and Ueber den Gegensatz zwischen Genetikern und Methodikern und 
dessen Vermittlung (in the Zeitschr. fiir Phil. u. philos. Krit., vol. 51, Halle, 1870). G. Grote, Plato, 
ete. (see above, § 39, p. 96); 2d edition, Lond., 1867. Cf., on this work by Grote, J. 8t. Mill, in the Hdind. 
Review, April, 1866; Paul Janet, in the Journal des Savans, June, 1866, pp. 381-395, and Feb., 1867, pp. 
114-132; Charles de Rémusat, in the Revue des Dewe Mondes, vol. 73, 1868, pp. 43-77, and D. Peipers, in 
the Gétt. gelehrt. Anz., 1869, pp. 81-120, and zbéd., 1870, pp. 561-610. Carl Schaarschmidt, Die Sammlung 
der Platonischen Schriften, zur Scheidung der echten von den unechten untersucht, Bonn, 1866. 

Of the numerous editions and translations of and commentaries on single dialogues or collections of 


PLATO'S WRITINGS. 107 


dialogues—all of which can not here be cited (see Engelmann’s Bibliotheca Script. Class., 5th ed., Leipsic, 
1858, and also various lists of works in different volumes of the Philologus, and in works on the history 
of literature)—we may mention here: 

Dialogi selecti cura Ludov. Frid. Heindorfii,ad apparatum Inman. Bekkeri lect. denuo emend. 
Phil. Buttmann, Berlin, 1802-28. Dialogorum delectus ex rec. et cum lat. interpret. F. Aug. Woljia 
(Euthyphron, Apologia Crito), Berlin, 1812. Symposion, ed. F. A. Wolf. Leipsic, 1782. Phaedo, ed. 
D. Wyttenbach, Leyden, 1810; Leipsic, 1824 [T. D. Woolsey], etc. The Republic has been edited by 
Ast, K. Schneider, and others, the Leges by Ast, Schulthess, ete., Zuthydemus and Laches by Badham, 
Jena, 1855. 

Griechische Prosaiker in neuer Uebers. hrsg. von C. N.v. Ostander und G. Schwab (containing 
Plato’s works, translated by L. Georgii, Franz Susemihl, J. Deuschle, and others), Stuttgart (J. B. Metz- 
ler), 1853 seq. Pl.'s Werke, transl. by K. Prantl and others, Stuttgart (Karl Hoffmann), 1854 seq. 2.1.8 
ausgewdhite Schriften, fiir den Schulgebrauch erklart, by Christian Cron and Jul. Deuschle, Leips. 1857 
seq. 1.5 Phaedrus und Gastmahl, dibs mit einl. Vorwort von K. Lehrs, Leips. 1870. The Banquet has 
also been translated and explained by (among others) Ed. Zeller (Marburg, 1857), the Gorgias by G. Schult- 
hess (new, revised edition by S. Vogelin, Ziirich, 1857), the Republic by F. C. Wolf (Altona, 1799), Kleuker 
(Vienna, 1805), K. Schneider (Breslau, 1839), and others, [including Davies and Vaughan, The Republic of 
Plato, 4th ed., Cambridge, 1868; cf. also, W. Whewell, Platonic Dialogues for English Readers, 3 vols., 
1859-60.—Tr.]. 

On the Phaedrus compare the introductions of the various editors and translators of that dialogue, as 
also the appropriate parts in the comprehensive works of Ast, Socher, F. Hermann, Brandis, Zeller, Suse- 
mihl, Munk, Grote, etc., and, in particular, A. B. Krische, Ueber Pl.’s Phaedr., Gott. 1848; Jul. Deuschle, 
Ueber den innern Gedankenzus. im Pl. Phaedrus, in the Zeitschr. f. die Alterthwmswias, 1854, pp. 
25-44: Die Pl. Mythen, insbes. der Mythus im Phaedr., Hanau, 1854; Lipke, De Phaedri consilio (G.- 
Pr.), Wesel, 1856; Ὁ. R. Volquardsen, Pl.’s Phaedrus, Pl.’s erste Schrift, Kiel, 1862; F. Bresler, Ueber den 
Pl. Phaedr. (G.-Pr.), Dantzic, 1867; Rud. Kihner, Pl. de eloquentia in Phaedro dialogo judicium (G.- 
Pr.), Spandau, 1868; Carl Schmelzer, Zu Pl. Phaedrus (Progr.), Guben, 1868; L. B. Forster, Quaestio de 
Pl. Phaedro, Berlin, 1869. Cf. also Lehrs’ Introduction to his translation of the Phaedrus and the Sym- 
postion, Leipsic, 1860. 

Of the Platonic Symposion treat (besides Schleiermacher, Steinhart, ete.): Ἐν A. Wolf, in his Ver- 
mischte Schr., pp. 288-339 ; Carl Fortlage, Philosophische Meditutionen tiber Plato's Sympos., Heidelberg, 
1835; Ferd. Delbriick, De Plat. Symposio, Bonn, 1889: Albert Schwegler, Ueber die Compos. des fides 
Symp., Tibingen, 1843; Ed. Wunder, Blicke in Pl.’s Symp., in the Philol., V. pp. 652 seq. ; Franz Suse- 
mihl, Ueber die Compos. des Pl. Gastmahls, in the Philol., VI. 1851, pp. 177 seq., and VIII. 1853, pp. 
153-159; Ed. Zeller, in his Translation of the Symp., Marburg, 1859. On the relation of the Platonic to the 
Xenophontic Symposion, see Boeckh, De simultate, quam Plato cum Xenophonte exercuisse Sertur, 
Berlin, 1811 (cf. Boeckh, in vy. Raumer’s Antiguar. Briefe, Leips. 1851, p. 40 seq.); K. F. Hermann, Num 
Pl.an Xenoph. Convivium suum prius scripserit, atque de consilio horum libellorum, Marb. 1834; 
Vermuthung, dass Pl. Symposion Glter sei als das Xenophontische, gerechtfertigt, ib. 1841; Zur Frage 
tiber das Zeitverhdltniss der beiden Symposien, in the Philol., VIII. pp. 29-838. Arn. Hug argues on 
decisive grounds in favor of the priority in time of the Banquet of Xenophon, in the Phi/ol., VII. pp. 
638-695; Georg Ferd. Rettig (argues in the same sense), Progr., Berne, 1864. 

Of the dialogue Protagoras write (besides Schleiermacher, Steinhart, Susemihl, Grote, etc.) Conr. G. 
Fehmer, Pl. Protag. nach seinem innern Zusammenhang entwickelt (Progr.), Zeitz, 1839; W. Natt- 
mann, De Pl. Protag., Emmerich, 1855; Kroschel, Zu den chronol. Verh. des Pl. Protag., in the Zeitechr. 
Sf. d. Gymnasialwesen, XI. 1857, pp. 561-567; Richard Schéne, Veber Pl. Protag., ein Beitrag zur Losung 
der Pl. Frage, Leips. 1862; Meinardus, Wie ist Pl. Protag. aufzufassen ? (G.-Pr.), Oldenburg, 1864; Wal- 
deck, Analyse des Pl. Protag. (G.-Pr.), Corbach, 1868. 

On the order of ideas in the Gorgias and the tendency of the dialogue compare, in particular, Joh. Bake, 
De Gorg. Pl. consilio et ingenio, in B.'s Scholica Hyponmemata, III. pp. 1-26, Leyden, 1844; Herm. 
Bonitz, in his above-mentioned Studien; Ludw. Paul, Ist die Scene fiir den Gorg.im Hause des Kal- 
Vikles ? (Festgruss an die 27 Philol.-Vers.), Kiel, 1869. [The Gorgias of Plato, T. D. Woolsey, Boston, 
1842, 2d edition, 1848.--- 77". 

In regard to the Meno, Zuthyphron, Crito, and other minor dislogues, as the Philebus, Parmenides, 
Sophistes. etc., it may suffice here to refer to the works of Schaarschmidt and Grote, of whom the former 
disputes, while the latter defends, the authenticity of all these dialogues. [Recent translations of three of 
these dialogues are: Philebus, a Dialogue of Plato, etc., translated by Edward Poste, London, (since) 
1360; The Sophistes of Plato, translated and preceded by an Intr. on Ancient and Modern Philosophy, by 
R. W. Mackay, Lond. 1868; Plato's Meno, transl. by Mackay, with an Essay on the Moral Education of the 
Greeks, London, 1869.— 77. 


108 PLATO’S WRITINGS. 


The principal works relating to the Republic are cited ad § 48, and those relating to the 7imaeus and 
Phaedo, ad § 42. 

The spuriousness of all the Letters attributed to Plato has been demonstrated most decisively by Herm. 
Thom. Karsten (see above, § 39, p. 99). 


The Aristotelian citations from Plato form the only sufficient external criterion and 
certificate of the genuineness of the works of Plato. Every dialogue which is unques- 
tionably attested as Platonic by Aristotle, must be regarded as genuine, or has at least the 
most decided presumption in its favor. Of course, the converse is not true, that the 
silence of Aristotle proves the spuriousness of a dialogue, although under specific cireum- 
stances this silence is certainly to be considered as an important element in the evidence. 
The question of genuineness in connection with those dialogues which are not proved 
authentic by Aristotle’s testimony, must be decided mainly on internal grounds. The 
libraries of Plato’s pupils, while sufficient to assure the preservation of all that was 
genuine among the works attributed to Plato, were insufficient to assure the exclusion 
of all that was spurious. On the one hand, works published by immediate disciples of 
Plato (for example, Leges, Epinomis, Sophistes, and Politicus), which were found in the 
libraries with no exact indication of the name of the author, or the name of the author 
having been lost, were early received as works of Plato; among these were some that 
were written in the spirit of Plato’s doctrine and under his name, being founded on 
his posthumous literary remains or on his oral utterances; on the other hand, some 
works, which may have been composed from sixty to one hundred years after Plato’s 
death (for example, a part of the Letters), were received into the Alexandrian Library as 
works presumably Platonic. Still others of Plato’s ‘‘ Works” are forgeries of even later 
date. 

The trilogies, as arranged by Aristophanes of Byzantium are (according to Diog. L., 
III. 61.) the following: 1) Rep., Timaeus, Critias; 2) Sophista, Politicus, Cratylus; 3) Leges, 
Minos, Epinomis; 4) Theaet., Euthyphro, Apologia; 5) Crito, Phaedo, Epistolae; besides 
these, there were other dialogues which Aristophanes received as genuine, and enumerated 
separately. It is not known which these were. The tetralogies proposed by Thrasyllus 
were (according to Diog L., 56 seq.): 1) Euthyphron, Apologia, Crito, Phaedo ; 2) Cratylus, 
Theaetetus, Sophista, Politicus; 3) Parmenides, Philebus, Convivium, Phaedrus; 4) Alci- 
biades I. and II., Hipparchus, Anterastae; 5) Theages, Charmides, Laches, Lysis; 6) 
Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno; 7) Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Io, Menexenus; 
8) Clitophon, Rep., Timaeus, Critias; 9) Minos, Leges, Epinomis, Epistolae. 

As dialogues confessedly spurious, Diog. L. names the following: Mido, Eryxias, 
Haleyo, eight dialogues without an introduction (ἀκέφαλοι 77) Sisyphus, Axiochus, Phaeaces, 
Demodocus, Chelidon, Hebdome, Epimenides. Of these are preserved: 1) Axiochus; 2) 
Concerning what is just (one of the dialogues without exordium); 3) Concerning virtue 
(ditto); 4) Demodocus; 5) Sisyphus; 6) Eryxias; 7) Haleyo (which usually accompanies 
Lucian’s works); to these are to be added the Definitiones, which are likewise spurious. 

Schleiermacher places in the first, or elementary division of the Platonic works, as chief 
works: Phaedrus, Protagoras, Parmenides; as adjuncts: Lysis, Laches, Charmides, Euthy- 
phron; as occasional writings: Apologia and Crito; and as semi-genuine or spurious: Io, 
Hippias Minor, Hipparchus, Minos, Alcibiades II. In the second division, which contains the 
dialogues indirectly dialectical in form, dialogues devoted principally to the explanation of 
knowledge and of intelligent action, Schleiermacher classes as chief works: Theaetetus, 
Sophistes, Politicus, Phaedo, Philebus; as adjuncts: Gorgias, Meno, Euthydemus, Craty- 
lus, Convivium ; as semi-genuine or spurious: Theages, Erastae, Alcibiades I., Menexenus, 
Hippias Major, Clitopho. The third, constructive division, finally, contains, according te 


PLATO’S WRITINGS. 109 


Schleiermacher, as chief works the dialogues: Republic, Timaeus, and Critias; and as an 
adjunct, the Leges.—Brandis agrees substantially with Schleiermacher, but holds that 
the Protagoras may have been composed before the Phaedrus, and places (with Zeller} 
Parmenides immediately after Sophistes and Politicus. 

K. F. Hermann includes in the first of the three development-periods which he ascribes 
to Plato, the following dialogues: Hipp. Min., Io, Alcib. I., Charm., Lysis, Laches, Protag., 
Euthyd. The Apol., Crito, Gorgias, Euthyphro, Meno, Hipp. Major belong to a “‘ transition 
period.” In the second, or Megaric period, he places Cratylus, Theaet., Soph., Politicus, 
Parmenides, and in the third period, the period of maturity, Phaedrus, Menexenus, Con- 
vivium, Phaedo, Phileb., Rep., Tim., Critias, Leges. 

Steinhart (in his introductions to the Platonic dialogues accompanying Miiller’s trans- 
lation) adopts substantially the arrangement of Hermann, modifying it only in a few minor 
points. Susemihl, who at first (in his Prodromus Platon. Forschungen) was more inclined 
to the view of Schleiermacher, approached subsequently nearer to that of Hermann, 
adopting an intermediate and conciliatory position between them. He holds that a definite 
plan underlies the Platonic writings, but that this was not wholly developed in Plato’s 
mind at the very beginning of his literary activity. He believes that it was developed 
gradually, like his philosophy, during the first stadia ef his literary activity, becoming 
constantly clearer and more complete. Susemihl differs from Hermann, in ascribing the 
development of philosophical doctrine in Plato’s mind less to external influences and more 
to Plato’s originality. Susemihl regards the Phaedrus as earlier than the dialogues of 
Hermann’s ‘‘ Megaric period,” or, at least, than a part of them. 

Munk holds fast to the fundamental idea of Schleiermacher, that all the dialogues of 
Plato were composed with reference to a determinate plan, but believes that they were 
nearly all written after the death of Socrates. He emphasizes more the artistic side of this 
plan than the didactic, and supposes that Plato designed in the succession of his writings 
to present an idealized portrait of Socrates as the genuine philosopher; he believes, accord- 
ingly, that by the chronological succession of the scenes or “situations,” and especially 
by the increasing age at which Socrates figures in the successive dialogues, Plato indicated 
the order in which he himself intended them to be studied, and that this order agrees in 
general with the time of their composition. Munk’s theory is an hypothesis worthy of 
consideration. Many of the results of special investigation accord very well with it, 
while others seem to oppose it, though without being sufficient to set aside entirely 
the principle involved. But it is beyond question that the manner in which Munk has 
carried through and applied his principle in detail, is imperfect, and leaves room for 
numerous corrections. Munk has neglected the question of the genuineness of the 
dialogues, and has often either made too light work of the investigation of their chrono- 
logical succession or conducted it from too exclusive a stand-point. He has, nevertheless, 
furnished many very valuable contributions to this department of special investigation. 
He distinguishes three series of writings: I. Socrates’ consecration to philosophy and his 
contests against false wisdom; time of composition 389-384 B. c.: Parm. (time of the 
action, 446), Protag. (434), Charm. (432), Laches (421), Gorgias (420), Io (420), Hippias I. 
(420), Cratylus (420), Euthyd. (420), Sympos. (417). II. Socrates teaches true wisdom ; 
time of composition, 383-370: Phaedrus (410), Philebus (410), Rep., Tim., and Critias (409, 
see Munk in Jahn’s Jahrb., 79, p. 191). III. S. demonstrates the truth of his teachings by 
the criticism of opposite opinions and by his death as a martyr; time of composition, after 
370: Meno (405), Theaet. (on the day when the accusation was brought forward by 
Meletus), Soph. and Politicus (one day later), Euthyphron (the same day with Theaet.). 
Apolog. (one day after the embassy to Delos), Crito (two days before the death of Socrates), 


110 PLATO'S WRITINGS. 


Phaedo (on the day of Socrates’ death). These writings form, according to Munk, a Cyclug 
complete in itself; they were preceded by a few youthful compositions, viz.: Aletb. I., 
Lysis, and Hippias II., and followed by Menexenus (composed after 387) and Leges (begun 
in 367). 

Grote holds that all those dialogues which were considered genuine by Thrasyllus are 
really such, because it is to be presupposed that they were preserved in the Alexandrian 
Library as Platonic writings (which is, indeed, very probable), and because it is further to 
be assumed that this Library received them in the beginning from Platonists of the 
Academy (which is probably true of many of these writings, but scarcely of all), and that 
these Platonists possessed a complete and correct collection of the genuine Platonic 
writings. (This latter supposition, however, is very doubtful, and is not proved; for in 
those early times the productive philosophical interest generally took precedence of the 
literary and antiquarian; it is quite conceivable that among Plato’s remains, as also in 
book-collections belonging to Platonists, were included copies of the dialogical writings 
of Plato’s disciples—which, from all the indications, we must suppose to have been very 
numerous—some of them without precise indications as to their authorship, and that this 
gave occasion, earlier or later, to errors, and even to imposture. The supposition that a 
complete collection of the genuine writings of Plato was in the possession of the School, and 
that this served as the norma for the Platonic canon, would prove too much, since from it 
would follow the genuineness of the entire collection transmitted; but surely the genuine- 
ness of all the contents of that collection can not be satisfactorily defended, as, e. g., that 
of Minos and the Epistles, which are certainly spurious, yet belong to the writings con- 
sidered genuine by Aristophanes of Byzantium.) Grote assumes, further, that all the 
dialogues of Plato and those of the other companions of Socrates were composed after the 
death of Socrates; he supports this altogether reasonable opinion with the most cogent 
arguments. Grote rejects the hypothesis of Schleiermacher and Munk, of a didactic or 
artistic plan comprehending, with few exceptions, all the dialogues; he denies all 
‘peremptory and intentional sequence or interdependence ;” each dialogue, he argues, is 
the product of the ‘‘state of Plato’s mind at the time when it was composed ;” in the com- 
position of the dialogues of research or inquiry, it is not necessary to suppose that Plato 
was already in possession of the solutions contained in the constructive dialogues; the 
disturbing of prejudices and pointing out of difficulties has in itself a very great worth; 
“the dialogues of research present an end in themselves.” Here Grote seems to go too 
far. That, for example, in the Protagoras, the Platonic Socrates hypothetically develops 
opinions which were not held by Plato himself, and that this is intimated by Plato by the 
early age at which he brings forward Socrates in the dialogue named—thereby suggesting 
a more advanced and mature stadium in Socrates’ life, to be set forth in other dialogues— 
all this would have to be admitted, even though Schleiermacher’s and Munk’s view of an 
artistic and didactic plan underlying all the dialogues, were justly rejected. Grote does 
not believe that the chronological sequence of most of the dialogues can be determined ; 
he considers them in his work in the following order: Apologia (early, and essentially 
faithful), Crito, Euthyphron, Alc. I. and II., Hippias Major and Minor, Hipparchus, Minos, 
Theages, Erastae, Ion, Laches, Charmides, Lysis, Euthydemus, Meno, Protagoras, Gorgias, 
Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposion, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophistes, Politicus, Cratylus, 
Philebus, Menexenus, Clitopho (which Grote defends as genuine, but fragmentary, and 
first made public after Plato’s death), Rep., Tim., and Critias, Leges, and Epinomis. 
Grote’s work is rich in suggestion and instruction; the author of the ‘‘ History of Greece” 
maintains here his masterly superiority in historical presentation, but his acceptance as 
genuine of all the dialogues accredited by Thrasyllus has caused him to lose sight of the 


PLATO'S WRITINGS. 111 


essential unity present in Plato’s thought and works, and to admit in its stead a multi- 
fariousness abounding in change and contradiction. 

Schaarschmidt’s investigations relate chiefly to the question of the genuineness or spu- 
riousness of Plato’s works, and incidentally only to that of their chronological order. The 
result he arrives at is, that the authenticity of the following dialogues only is fully assured: 
Phaedrus, Protagoras, Banquet, Gorgias, Republic, and Timaeus, Theaetetus, Phaedo, Laws. 
In Plato’s genuine works he sees dramatic dialogues, which are not intended to instruct 
the reader in the solution of the fundamental questions of philosophy themselves, but 
rather from the stand-point of the writer's own experience, to impress in a living, impres- 
sive manner on the heart of the reader that the dialectical labor necessary to the solution 
of those questions is the moral concern and duty of every man, and to offer, in the exam- 
ple of the most remarkable investigator of ideas, samples of the art by which one elevates 
himself into the ideal region and in its light contemplates the essence of the soul, the best 
form of the state, or even of the cosmos, as the expression of the most perfect harmony. 
The Socratic dialogue, which with Xenophon and other followers of Socrates served to 
recall their late master’s discussions concerning ideas, was elevated by Plato, who used the 
greatest liberty in modifying its content as well as its shape, to a philosophical drama, in 
which Socrates and his collocutors acquire a typical character as representatives of various 
intellectual tendencies and ethical states. 

In all the dialogues of Plato, Socrates appears to such a degree and in such a manner 
idealized, that it is impossible to suppose any of them to have been composed before that 
event of Socrates’ death, which transfigured the image of Socrates in the mind of Plato. 
The Apology appears to have been written at an early period by Plato, and to present not 
merely the sense and spirit, but nearly the very words of Socrates’s defense (as Schleier- 
macher assumes). Setting aside this dialogue (and the Crito?), the ideal picture of 
Socrates, as presented in those dialogues, in which Plato represents him as a man not 
yet advanced in years, approaches nearest to his historical figure. This is true without 
exception, if we set aside as spurious the dialogue Parmenides, which treats of the ideas, 
and the One (ἕν), which can neither be nor not be. The time of the action of this 
dialogue is about 450, and in it the early training of Socrates is depicted unhistorically, 
with a certain idealization, as in Phaedo, p. 95 6, seq., not conformable to the tendency, 
early characteristic of Socrates, to ‘‘examine”’ subjects dialectically and in their ethical 
bearings, nor in a manner which accords with the Protagoras and the other dialogues, 
but with a mixture of later ideas, and such as were foreign to Socrates. The unjustified 
reproach is here directed against Socrates, that he had in earlier life assumed the ex- 
istence of ideas, for the purposes of preparatory dialectical exercises (conducted in the 
method of two-sided discussions respecting particular conceptions). Socrates appears as a 
man of middle age, probably not yet forty years old, and forcing the recognition of his 
mastership in philosophy, in discussions with Protagoras, who was by many years his 
senior (and incidentally also with Hippias and Prodicus), in the artistically very finished 
dialogue Protagoras. The date of this dialogue must be regarded as about 432 8. C., 
although it contains portions pointing anachronistically to a later period. It was certainly 
composed after the death of Socrates, and perhaps later than the Phaedrus. In the dia- 
logue Protagoras the relation of virtue to knowledge, the unity or plurality of the virtues, 
and the cultivation of virtue are made subjects of investigation, and the conceit of the 
Sophists, in presuming to be wise and to make others wise, is annihilated by the ἐξέτασις 
of Socrates, whose dialectic is based on an earnest striving after truth and morality. A 
dialogue more peculiarly Platonic in content and form is the Gorgias (on the questions: 
What is rhetoric? conversation between Socrates and Gorgias, cc, 2-15; What worth 


110 PLATO'S WRITINGS. 


and what real power does rhetoric possess? conversation between Socrates and Polus, cc 
16-36; Is the proper business of life political rhetoric or philosophy? conversation 
between Socrates and Callicles, cc, 57-83; the whole is at the same time a justification by 
Plato of himself in adopting the philosopher’s vocation). The time at which Plato would 
represent the conversations as being held, is probably 427 3B. c., though anachronistic 
reference is made in them to events of a later date. In these dialogues, as also in the 
following, whose authenticity in part is not fully certified, Laches (on Courage), Lysis 
(on Friendship), Charmides (on Temperance), Euthyphro (on Piety), Hippias Minor (on 
Willful Wrong-doing), and in others, which are of very doubtful authenticity or are 
decidedly spurious, the specifically Platonic theory of ideas is contained only by implication, 
but not formally developed and established. This may be explained by supposing that 
Plato in these dialogues intentionally confined himself to mere suggestions or intimations, ~ 
being guided in this by the didactic principle of a gradual exposition of his doctrines. Or, 
it may be explained by the hypothesis, that Plato had himself not yet arrived at the theory 
of ideas in its developed form (according to the principle of gradual development assumed 
by K. F. Hermann); but the circumstance that Plato in the Protagoras and also in Gor- 
gias (and Laches, etc.) introduces Socrates as a man still in middle age, is decidedly favor- 
able to the first supposition. The theory of ideas, with all the theoretical positions 
which it involves, is first expressly set forth in the Phaedrus and the Convivium, though 
in mythical form—not in the form of dialectical development. The dialogue Phaedrus 
criticises ostentatious eloquence (that of Lysias in particular) from the stand-point of 
philosophy, and the false art of instruction and education from the stand-point of that 
art which is true. It does this first by the collocation of discourses concerning love, 
the first Lysianic, the second in form only, and the third in both form and tendency, 
Platonic and Socratic, and then by a general consideration, founded on these examples, 
of the rhetorical and the philosophical or dialectical methods. But the examples, in 
respect of their subjects, are not arbitrarily chosen. They treat directly of the true end 
of life and of the way which conducts to it, love, taken in the philosophical sense, being 
here represented as the united striving of souls to reach the goal of philosophy, ὁ. e., the 
knowledge of ideas, and to attain to that practical conduct of life which corresponds with 
such knowledge; while an unphilosophical rhetoric is portrayed as pursuing ends alto- 
gether inferior. The Phaedrus is also a justification of Plato’s doctrinal activity as a 
teacher. In it, philosophical authorship is represented as secondary to, and dependent 
upon oral schooling in dialectic. It is held that the former should follow the latter 
only as ὑπόμνησις, and is nothing but a παγκάλη παιδιά, a kind of philosophical poesy 
(cf. Rep., p. 602), not to be compared with the serious earnestness of a life devoted, 
in common with others, to inquiry and to the work of education (a declaration, which, 
although its immediate occasion was Plato’s poetical imitation of the Socratic dialectic, 
none the less implies beyond a doubt the existence already of a circle of companions of 
like mind with Plato, and also a circle of scholars and co-investigators, who recognized 
Plato as their leader). The Convivium contains a series of discourses respecting love, 
which set forth the various conceptions of the same, ending with the highest philosophical 
conception of love, as maintained by Socrates, and all in the form of encomia addressed to 
Eros. At last Alcibiades steps in, extolling Socrates as one who, in his relations with 
himself, had exemplified the genuine, pedagogical love in a manner fully commensurate 
with the requirement of philosophy. The Convivium was composed 385-384, or at least 
not earlier (as appears from an historical allusion contained in it); the action falls in the 
year 417. The relation of this dialogue to the Symposion of Xenophon is discussed on 
the one side by K. F. Hermann (Progr., Marb. 1841; Gétt. 1844-45), who considers the 


΄ 


PLATO'S WRITINGS. 113 


Platonic composition the earlier; on the other, by A. Hug (in the Philol., VII. 1852, p. 638 
seq., to which Hermann responds, ibid., Vol. VIII.), G. Ferd. Rettig (Progr., Berne, 1864), 
and Boeckh (De simultate, quam Plato cum Xenophonte exercuisse fertur, Berlin, 1811, and in 
y. Raumer’s Antiquar. Briefe, Leipsic, 1851, p. 40 seq.). The Phaedrus appears to have 
been written not long before the Banquet; the time of the action in Plato’s intention may 
be perhaps most surely determined from the circumstance that Isocrates (born 435) is 
named in it as a young beginner, of whom great expectations might justly be entertained ; 
with this is to be joined the fact that Lysias, who is represented as living at Athens, is 
known from other sources to have returned thither from Lower Italy in the year 411; 
yet it is uncertain whether Plato knew and took into consideration this time of the return 
of Lysias, of which he nowhere makes mention himself. According to Diog. L., II. 38, 
the Phaedrus was Plato’s earliest composition; yet this statement, though possibly correct, 
is not sufficiently well authenticated. The date of the composition of the Phaedrus falls 
undoubtedly within the years 396-384 B.c., according to the present state of investiga- 
tions; but nearly all the data on which are founded the various attempts at a more exact 
determination of it are very uncertain. In case Plato made this dialogue first public on his 
return after long journeys, and wrote the Protagoras, as also the Gorgias, at a later period, 
it would seem beyond doubt that in these latter dialogues, which are filled with elementary 
inquiries in the field of dialectic and ethics, Plato consciously and with artistic intention 
represented the age of Socrates as such, that notwithstanding their possibly later compo- 
sition, they could be used as preparatory for the development of ideas contained in the 
Phaedrus—each of the dialogues, of course, being considered in its relation to the ideal 
picture of the Platonic Socrates, as presented by all the dialogues taken together. 

In a letter addressed to me, and which its author has kindly permitted me to publish, 
Susemihl expresses his belief that the date of the composition of the Phaedrus may be 
fixed at 389 or 388. He reasons as follows: ‘‘Isocrates must have been at that time a 
well-known author and perhaps also already a teacher of eloquence; but up to 392 he 
neither engaged in giving instruction as such a teacher, nor in any other occupation except 
the composition of judicial discourses, a work which he afterward entirely discontinued ; 
and since the criticism of Lysias in the Phaedrus turns on one of the ostentatious discourses 
of that orator, it is hardly possible not to suppose that the Isocrates who is contrasted 
with him, had already begun to compose such discourses, when the dialogue was written. 
Now the oldest of these, the Encomium of Busiris, seems to date from 390-389. On the 
other hand, it is difficult to suppose that long after 390 or 389 Plato should not have be- 
come so undeceived respecting the character and merits of Isocrates, as to render it impos- 
sible for him still to express himself respecting him in such terms as those here employed 
by him. Spengel, indeed (Jsokr. und Pl., p. 15 seq.; 347 seq.), thinks that when Isocrates 
composed his work against the Sophists, which is beyond question to be considered as a 
sort of inaugural programme of his course as an instructor, he can have been at the most 
not more than forty years old, since he says in Antid., §195, that he wrote this work 
νεώτερος and ἀκμάζων: but it is to be noticed, 1) that he there judges himself (§ 9) 
πρεσπύτερος only at the age of eighty-two years; 2) that if Isocrates opened his school 
at Athens as early as 496, he must at the same time have been writing judicial discourses 
during a period of at least two years, which contradicts the express testimony of Aristotle, 
in Cie., Brutus, 12, 48 (Fragm., 119, Rose).” 

Of very uncertain authenticity are the Hippias Major (On the Beautiful), Io (Concerning 
Inspiration and Reflection), Meno (Can Virtue be Taught?), and Menexenus (a λόγος ἐπι- 
᾿τάφιος on fallen Athenians with Socrates as the speaker). It is possible that Plato early 
commenced writing on the dialogue on justice, which he afterward enlarged into the work 

8 


114 PLATO’S WRITINGS. 


respecting justice in the life of the individual and in the state (The State, Politeia, Res- 
publica). This work was followed by the Timaeus (containing Plato's natural philosophy, 
with Timzeus the Pythagorean as spokesman) and Critias (a fragment of an unfinished 
work, containing an imaginary political story of the primitive times); the time of these 
dialogues falls in the year 409 B.c. The Phaedo, which presents the dying Socrates 
demonstrating the immortality of the soul, seems to have been commenced later than 
the Timaeus and to close up the Cyclus, by showing how the noblest and the abiding 
good for the immortal soul consists in philosophical knowledge and in action founded 
on such knowledge (somewhat as in the Banquet, where Plato advances from the 
praise of Eros to that of the person of the true Erotic). To the dialogues of late com- 
position, the Theaetetus (which stands in the closest relation to Hep., V, 474 seq., and 
Tim., p. 51) seems to belong. In this dialogue Plato shows how knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) 
differs from sense-perception (αἴσθησις, ch. 8-30), and from correct judgment or opinion 
(δόξα ἀληθής, chs. 31-38). The definition of ἐπιστήμη as δόξα ἀληθὴς μετὰ λόγου (ch. 39 
seq.), he finds unsatisfactory on account of the ambiguity of the term λόγος. He thus 
indirectly props up the theory of ideas by maintaining that the difference between knowl- 
edge on the one hand, and sensuous perception and opinion on the other, is founded 
on a difference between the objects of knowledge and those of sensation and opinion 
(hence on the difference between the ideas and the individual objects existing in time and 
space). Of uncertain, yet extremely probable authenticity is the dialogue analogous in 
character to the Theaetetus, entitled Cratylus (περὶ ὀρθότητος ὀνομάτων. Whether the 
names of things belong to them ¢toe, by natural adaptation, or are given to them 
arbitrarily and by common consent); see, on the one hand, Schaarschmidt, Ueber die 
Unechtheit des Dialogs Kratylos, in the Rhein. Mus., N. 8., XX. 1865, pp. 321-356; and his 
work: Die Sammlung, etc., p. 245 seq.; on the other hand, Alberti, in the Rhein. Mus., XXI., 
1866, pp. 180-209; and in the Gott. Gel. Anz., 1867, pp. 721-758; and especially Benfey 
in the Nachrichten von der Kgl. Ges. d. Wiss. zw Gottingen, No. 8, March 7, 1866: ‘ Auszug 
einer Abhandlung iiber die Aufgabe des Platon. Dialogs Kratylus,” or the work itself, which 
has since been published at Géttingen, 1866; also Lehrs, in the Rhin. Mus., N. 8., XXII. 
1867, pp. 436-440. It is also questionable whether Plato himself, or, what would appear 
more probable, an early Platonist composed the Euthydemus, a dialogue richly spiced with 
pleasantry, and the subject of which Bonitz (Platon. Studien, Heft 2, Vienna, 1860, p. 32 seq.) 
happily describes as follows: ‘The vocation of philosophy, as the true educatrix of youth, 
is defended and justified in opposition to the seeming wisdom which seeks to take its place, 
in a contest in which each is brought forward in its own defense.” Schaarschmidt at- 
tempts to demonstrate its spuriousness (in his work above cited, pp. 326-342). The Philebus, 
treating of the Good, is one of the latest compositions of Plato; in it we perceive already 
something of the Pythagorizing manner, toward which Plato inclined in his later years, 
and which prevailed still more among the first Academics. The Sophistes (on the Sophist 
and the field of his knowledge, the Non-Existent) and the Politicus (the Statesman and 
the field of his knowledge and action) were composed, in all probability, not by Plato, but 
by one of his scholars (see Schaarschmidt, Rhein. Mus., N. S., XVIII. pp. 1-28, and XIX. 
pp. 63-96, 1862 and 63: yet cf. Hayduck, Ueber die Echtheit des Soph. und Pol., I. ( Greifsw. 
Gymn.-Progr.), 1864, and Ed. Alberti, Rhein. Mus., 1866, No. 2, p. 130 seq.; and on the other 
side again, Schaarschmidt, Die Sammlung, ete., pp. 181-245). The dialogues Sophistes 
and Politicus are formally connected with the Theaetetus of Plato, as constituting with it 
one whole. They purport to furnish that continuation of the inquiry begun in the 
Theaetetus, which was declared necessary at the end of this dialogue, and in which the 
subject of Ideas was to be more especially treated of. But their relation to the Theaetetus 


PLATO'S DIALECTIC. 115 


is only superficial, and the continuation alluded to was furnished rather in the investiga- 
tions conducted by Plato in the midst of his disciples and in the teachings he then and 
there communicated to them, the so-called ἄγραφα δόγματα. The last work of Plato, made 
public, according to ancient accounts, by one of his disciples, Philip the Opuntian, from 
Plato’s rough draught, is the Leges (Concerning the second-best state). By the guest from 
Athens, who leads in the conversation, Plato seems to have intended himself. 

Adhuc sub judice lis est. The immediate problem is now the exact investigation of the 
composition of the dialogues taken singly, as introductory to which work, besides Schleier- 
macher’s Introductions and the works of Brandis, Steinhart, Susemihl, and others, such 
essays as Trendelenburg’s De Plat. Philebi consilio (Berlin, 1837), and Bonitz’s Platonische 
Studien (Vienna, 1858-60), may be profitably consulted. 


§ 41. The division of philosophy into Ethics, Physics, and Dia- 
lectic, though not expressly enunciated by Plato, was practically 
involved in his treatment of the different classes of philosophical 
problems in different dialogues, and may be made the basis of an 
exposition of his doctrine. We begin with the Dialectic of Plato. 

The Platonic philosophy centers in the Theory of Ideas. The 
Platonic Idea (idéa or eidoc) is the pure, archetypal essence, in which 
those things which are together subsumed under the same concept, 
participate. Aisthetically and ethically, it is the perfect in its kind, 
to which the given reality remains perpetually inferior. Logically 
and ontologically considered, it is the object of the concept. As the 
objects of the outer world are severally known through corresponding 
mental representations, so the idea is known through the concept. 
The Idea is not the essence immanent in the various similar individual 
objects, as such, but rather this essence conceived as perfect in its 
kind, immutable, unique, and independent, or existing per se. The 
idea respects the universal; but it is also represented by Plato as a 
spaceless and timeless archetype of individuals. The more Plato in 
his speculation and in his language gives place to his faney, so much 
the more does he individualize his Ideas; the more he confines 
himself to pure cogitation, so much the more does he approach the 
apprehension of the idea under the form of universality. Let the 
individuals which share in the same essence or belong to the same 
class, be conceived as freed from the limits of space and time, from 
materiality and individual deficiency, and so reduced to a unity, 
which is the ground of their existence, and this unity (objective and 
real, not merely thought by us through abstraction) will be the Pla- 
tonic idea. 

To express the relation of individuals to their corresponding ideas, 


110 PLATO’S DIALECTIC. 


Plato employs the term “ participation” (μέθεξις), and also “imita- 
tion” (μίμησις, ὁμοίωσις). The idea is the archetype (tapddevyya), indi- 
vidual objects are images (εἴδωλα, ὁμοιώματα) ; the idea, though existing 
independently (αὑτὸ κάϑ᾽ αὑτό), has also a certain community (κοινωνία) 
with things; it is in some sense present (παρουσία) in them; but the 
specific nature of this community Plato has neglected more precisely 
to define. 

The attribution to the ideas of independent, singular existence, 
or the hypostatizing of the ideas, implied a certain separation of them 
from individual things. Thus understood, the doctrine was described 
and combated by Aristotle as a χωρίζειν (separation of the ideal 
from the real). This view of the ideas seems to have grown upon 
Plato, so that at last we find him considering the ideas (and espe- 
cially the highest among them, the idea of the Good) as efficient 
causes, which impart to individuals their existence and essence, 
Plato calls them figuratively (in the Timaeus) Gods, and appears, in 
speaking of the World-Builder (the Demiurgos), who shapes ail 
things for good, to intend the idea of the Good. The (unconsciously 
mythical) personification of the ideas became complete in the asser- 
tion, that movement, life, animation, and reason belonged to them; 
yet this doctrine (enounced in the dialogue Sophistes) can scarcely 
have been that of Plato himself, who held fast to the immutability 
of the ideas, but only of a portion of his disciples. 

A plurality of ideas is assumed by Plato, corresponding with the 
plurality of concepts. All the relations which subsist between con- 
cepts find, according to Plato, their analoga in the relations of the 
ideas to each other. The higher or more general concept is related 
to the lower or less general ones ranged under it, as each of the latter 
is to the individual notions which it includes ; accordingly, in Plato’s 
view, that idea which is the object of the higher concept, is so related 
to those ideas, which are the objects of the lower concepts, as is each 
of these ideas to the group of individual objects corresponding to it. 

The highest idea is the Idea of the Good. As the cause of being 
and cognition, it is as the sun in the kingdom of ideas. Plato 
appears to identify it with the supreme Deity. That the idea of the 
good, and not that of Being, should be conceived as the highest, is in 
consonance with the ethical character of the doctrine of ideas, accord- 
ing to which the idea is the perfect in its kind; and it is not in 
conflict with the logical and ontological purport of that doctrine, 


PLATO'S DIALECTIC. i ea ν 


because the good may be considered as an idea quite as universal as 
being, since every thing, in so far as it is truly existent, is also neces- 
sarily good. 

As mathematical cognition holds a middle place between philo- 
sophical and sensible cognition, so mathematical objects form a mean 
between sensuous things and ideas. 

The method of cognition by which the ideas are apprehended, is 
Dialectic, which proceeds in a twofold direction, rising first to the 
universal and then returning from the universal to the particular. 
A forerunner of dialectical cognition, and, in the event of the latter 
being unattainable, its substitute, is the mythical method in treating 
of the ideas. 

The work of drawing up a complete system of the ideas was not 
accomplished by Plato. As a step in this direction, however, we 
may regard the reduction of the ideas to numbers, which Plato 
undertook in his old age, after having originally developed the theory 
of ideas apart from all consideration of the relations of numbers. 
Such also was the stoicheiclogy connected with this reduction, or the 
doctrine of the singular or limiting element, of the undetermined 
element determinable by the former, and of the third element result- 
ing from the mixture of the first two,—the three constituting the 
elements of all that exists. 


On the System of Plato in general, ef., in addition to the above-cited works of Tennemann and K. F. 
Hermann and the histories of Ritter, Brandis, and Zeller, the following: Phil. Guil. van Heusde, Znitiv 
Philosophiae Platonicae, Utrecht, 1827-86; ed. IL, Leyden, 1842; ©. Beck, Plato's Philosophie im 
Abriss ihrer genetischen Entwickelumg, Stuttgart, 1853; A. Arnold, System der Platonischen Philo- 
sophie als Hinleitung in das Studium des Plato und der Philosophie tiberhaupt, Erfurt, 1858. (Forms 
the third part of Plat, Werke, einzeln erkldrt und in ihrem Zusammenhange dargestellt, Erfurt, 
1836 seq.) 

On the whole Platonic philosophy in its relations to Judaism and Christianity, see Car. Frid. Staudlin, 
De philosophiae Platonicae cum doctrina religionis Judaica et Christiana cognatione, Gott. 1819; C. 
Ackermann, Das Ohristliche in Plato und in der Platonischen Philosophie, Wamburg, 1835 [translated by 
8. R. Asbury: Zhe Christian Element in Plato, Edinburgh, 1861.—7r.]; Ferd. Christ. Baur, Das Christliche 
des Platonismus oder Sokrates und Christus, in the Ztschr. fiir Theol., 1837, No. 8, pp. 1-154, and sepa- 
rately, Tiib. 1837. (Baur shows how the practicable elements in the Platonic ideal state were realized by 
the Christian church, which result he attributes to the inner relationship of the two, as each recognizing the 
substantiality of the ideal; but Platonism, he adds, was wanting in the sense of the unity of the divine and 
the human, in positive or substantial import, and in a recognition of the phenomena of subjective con- 
sciousness. Baur’s conception of “substantiality,” however, wavers between that of unconsciousness [the 
ancient conception] and transcendence [a more modern one]. It may well be asked, whether more of 
“unity” is not visible in Plato’s dialectic than in the dogmas of the church?) A. Neander, Wiss. Abhana- 
tumgen, ed. by J. L. Jacobi, Berlin, 1851, p. 169 seq. ; J. Dillinger, Heidenthwm und Judenthum, Regensburg, 
1857, p. 295 seq.; R. Ehlers, De vi ac potestate, quam philosophia antiqua, imprimis Platonica et Stoica, 
tn doctr. apologetarum saec 11. habuerit, Gétt., 1859; F. Michelis, Die Philosophie Plato's in ihrer 
innern Bexiehung zur geoffenbarten Wahrheit, Minster, 1859-60; Deitrich Becker, Das philos. System 
Plato's in seiner Bezichung cum christlichen Dogma, Freiburg, 1862; Heinr. von Stein, Sieben Biicher 
eur Geschichte des Platonismus, Parts I. and IL, Gott., 1862-64; Alfred Fouillée, La philosophie de 


118 PLATO’S DIALECTIC. 


Platon: KEaposition, histoire et critique de la théorie des idées (Ouvrage couronné par Γ᾿ Acad. des 
Sciences Morales et Politiques), Paris, 1869. (Cf. the literature to § 48.) 

Among the earlier monographs on Plato’s theory of ideas may be mentioned those of Jak. Brucker 
(1748), Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1786), Friedrich Victor Leberecht Plessing, Joh. Friedr. Dammann, Th. 
Fahse (1795) ; among the more recent, those of Joh. Friedr. Herbart (De Platonici Systematis Fundamento 
Gétt., 1805, reproduced in Vol. 1. of Herbart’s KZ. Schr., 1842, p. 67 seq., and in Vol. XII. of his Compl. Works 
1852, p. 61 seq.; ef. Boeckh, Jenaer Lit.-Zeitung, 1808, No. 224.), Christ. Aug. Brandis (Diatribe Academica 
de perditis Aristotelis libris de Idets et de Bono, Bonn, 1823), Ad. Trendelenburg (Platonis de Ideis et Nu- 
meris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata, Leips. 1826), H. Richter (De Jd. Pi., Leips. 1821), Ludolf Wien- 
borg (De primitivo id. Pl. sensu, Altona, 1529), K. Ε΄ Hermann (Marb. Lect.-Kat., 1832-1833 and 1839), 
Herm. Bonitz (Disp. Platonicae duae; De Idea Boni; De Animae Mundanae apud Plat. Elementis, 
Dresden, 1837), Zeller (Ueber die Aristot. Darstellung der Platon. Philosophie, in Z.’s Plat. Studien, Tiib. 
1839, pp. 197-800), Franz Ebben (De Pl. id. doctrina, Bonn, 1849), J. F. Nourrisson (Quid Pl. de ideis sen- 
serit, Paris, 1852, Hapos. de la théorie platonicienne des idées, Paris, 1858), Graser (Torgau, 1861), 8. Rib- 
bing (see above, ὃ 40), Th. Maguire (Am Essay on the Platonic Idea, London, 1866), Herm. Cohen (Dis 
plat. Ideenlehre, psychologisch entwickelt, in the “ Zeitschr fiir Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwiss,” ed. 
by M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal, Vol. ΤΥ... Berlin, 1866, pp. 403-464); cf. Max Schneidewin’s Disquisitionum 
philos. de Platonis Theateti parte priori specimen (Inaug.-Diss.), Gottingen, 1865, and other opuscules 
by the same author on the Theaetetus, Soph., Parm., etc., and Ad. Trendelenburg’s Das Ebenmaass, ein 
Band der Verwandischaft Zrcischen der griechischen Archaeologie und Philosophie, Berlin, 1865. (The 
rising of the idea above the phenomenal—which is in conformity with the tendency of nature herself—is 
illustrated by Trendelenburg by an example from the plastic art of the Greeks, where the facial angle of 
Camper exceeds, in its approach to a right angle, the limits actually observed in nature; in this sense, 
says T., the idea is “the fundamental form or type, elevated above the mutation of phenomena, the arche- 
type, toward which all things tend.”) 

On the mathematical passages in Plato’s writings, Theodorus of Soli (Plutarch, De Def. Orac., ch. 32) 
and Theo. of Smyrna (τῶν κατὰ μαθηματικὴν χρησίμων εἰς THY τοῦ Πλάτωνος ἀνάγνωσιν) in ancient times, 
and in modern times Mollweide (Gott. 1805, and Leipsic, 1813), C. E. Chr. Schneider (De Numero Plat., 
Breslau, 1822), J. J. Fries (Pl.’s Zahl [Rep., 546], Heidelberg, 1828), C. F. Wex (De loco mathem. in 
Platonis Menone, Halle, 1825), Joh. Wolfg. Miller (Commentar tiber zwei Stellen in Pl.s Meno u. 
Theaet., Nuremberg, 1797; Priifung der von Wew versuchten Erkl., ibid. 1826), C. F. Hermann (De 
Numero Platonis, Marburg, 1838), E. F. August (Berlin, 1829 and 1844), and others, have written ; Adolph 
Benecke appears to have given the correct explanation of the geometrical hypothesis advanced in the Weng, 
in the Progr. des Elbinger Gymn., 1867. His merits in respect of the advancement of mathematics have 
been discussed (though, for the most part, without sufficiently critical investigation) by the historians of 
mathematics, especially by Montucla, Bossut, Chasles, Arneth, and in the monograph by C. Blass, De Plat. 
mathematico (Diss.-Inaug.), Bonn, 1861; ef. also Finger, De primordiis geometriae apud Graecos, Heidel- 
berg, 1831, and Bretschneider, in his work on the Geometry of Euclid, Leipsic, 1870. 

Of the Platonic Dialectic treat: Joh. Jac. Engel, Versuch einer Methode, die Vernunftlehre aus Pl. Dia- 
logen zu entwickeln, Berlin, 1780; Joh. Jac. Heinr. Nast, De meth. Pl. philos. docendi dialogicae, Stuttgard, 
1787; Analysis logica dial. Pl. qui inser. Meno, ibid., 1792-93; Jac. Borellus, De methodo Socr. docendi 
exemplo ὁ dial. Plat. qui inser. Euthyphro illustrata, Upsala, 1798; Fr. Hoffmann, Die Dialektik P1.'s, 
Munich, 1832; Karl Kiesel, in Gynin. Programmes, Cologne, 1840, Diisseldorf, 1851 and 1863; Th. Wilh. 
Danzel (Hamburg, 1841, and Leipsic, 1845), K. Kiihn (Berlin, 1843), K. Giinther (in the Philologus, V. 1850, 
p. 96 seq.), Kuno Fischer, De Parm. Plat., Stuttg., 1851; Karl Eichhoff, Logica triwn dial. Pl. explic. 
(Meno, Crito, Phacdo), G.-Pr., Duisburg, 1854; Ed. Alberti, Zur Dial. des Pl., vom Theaet. bis zum Parm., 
Leips. 1856 (from Suppl., Vol. L, to the W. Jahrb. f. Phil. u. Pdd.); H. Druon, An fuerit interna 8. eso- 
terica Pl. doctr., Paris, 1860; Holzer, Grundziige der Erkenntnisslehre in Plato's Staat. (G.-Pr.), Cottbus, 
1561; C. Martinius, Veber die Fragestellung in den Dialogen Plato's, in the Zeitschr. f. d. Gymn.- Wesen, 
Berlin, 1566, pp. 97-119 and 497-516; Rud. Alex. Reinhold Kleinpaul, Der Begr. der Erk. in Pl.'s Theaet. 
( Diss.-Lips.), Gotha, 1867; Josef Steger, Plat. Studien, I., Innsbruck, 1869; W. Weicker, Amor Platonicus et 
disserendi ratio Socratica qua necessitudine inter sese contineantur (G.-Pr.), Zwickan, 1869; Karl Uphues, 
Die philos. Untersuchungen des Pl. Soph. τς Parm. (Dissert), Minster, 1869; Hlem. der Platon Ph. auf 
Grund des Soph. u. mit Riicksicht auf die Scholastik, Soest, 1870. 

On the use of myths by Plato, ef. C. Crome (Gymn.-Progr., Dtisseldorf, 1835), Alb. Jahn (Berne, 1839), 
Schwanitz (Leips., 1852, Jena, 1863, Frankf.-on-the-M., 1864), Jul. Deuschle (Hanau, 1854), Hahn (Die pdda- 
gogischen Mythen Plato's, G.-Pr., Parchim, 1360), A. Fischer (Diss. Inaug., Kénigsberg, 1865). 

On Plato’s philosophy of language, ef. Friedr. Michelis (De enunciationis natura diss., Bonn, 1849), 
Jul. Deuschle (Marburg, 1852), Charles Lenormant (Sur le Cratyle de Pl., Athens, 1861); cf. Ed. Alberti 
Dia Sprachphilosophie vor Plato, in Philol., ΧΙ, Gott. 1856, pp. 681-705. ᾿ 


PLATO’S DIALECTIC. 119 


The division of philosophy into Ethics, Physics, and Dialectic (ascribed to Plato by Cic., 
Acad. Post., I. 5, 19) was first formally propounded (according to Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., 
VII. 16) by Xenocrates, the pupil of Plato; but Plato, as Sextus correctly says, was poten- 
tially its originator (δυνάμει ἀρχηγός). Several of Plato’s dialogues were devoted to ethics 
(from the Protag. to the Rep.), one (Timaeus) was devoted especially to physics, and one 
(Theaetetus, with which Cratylus, on Language, and some other dialogues belong, if genu- 
ine) to the theory of cognition; these dialogues were supplemented by oral lectures on 
the ideas and their elements (στοιχεῖα), in which were communicated the “ unwritten 
doctrines,” which were taken down by Aristotle, Hermodorus, and others, and were prob- 
ably used by the author of the Soph. and the Pol. 

Of the genesis of the theory of ideas we find an account in Arist., Met., I. 6 and 9 (cf. 
XIII. 4 seq.). Aristotle describes this theory as the joint product of the Heraclitean doctrine 
of the constant flux of things and of the Socratic fondness for definition. The doctrine, 
says Aristotle, that the sensuous is subject to perpetual change, was derived by Plato 
from Cratylus the Heraclitean, and was ever afterward maintained by him. Accordingly, 
when Plato had learned through Socrates of conceptions which, when once rightly defined, 
remain ever invariable, he believed that their counterparts must not be sought in the sen- 
suous world, but that there must be other existences which were the objects of conceptual 
cognition, and these objects he named ideas. The reduction of these ideas to (ideal) num- 
bers is spoken of in Met., XIII. 4, as a later modification of the original doctrine.-—Aristotle 
here gives to the logical and metaphysical side of the theory of ideas a prominence which 
belongs equally to the no less essential ethical and zsthetic side; in this he was undoubt- 
edly influenced by the prevalent shape assumed by the theory in the later phases of its 
development, in which the idea of that perfection, which transcends all experience, became 
gradually superseded by the idea of universality—so, already, in connection with the idea 
of table, in Rep., X. 596. 

In the Phaedrus of Plato the doctrine of ideas is presented symbolically, and yet in 
such form that the author of the dialogue must unquestionably have been already in pos- 
session of the theory in its logical form, although reserving its scientific presentation and 
demonstration for later dialogues. According to the myth in the Phaedrus (p. 247 seq.), 
the pure essences, or the ideas, sit enthroned in a place beyond the vault of heaven—in 
particular the ideas of justice, temperance, science, etc. They are colorless, without figure, 
imperceptible by any sense, and accessible only to the contemplative view of the reason 
(νοῦς). Plato portrays the process by which one rises to the knowledge of the ideas as an 
upward journey of the soul to the super-celestial region. In the Conviv. (p. 211 seq.) Plato 
defines the idea of the beautiful in opposition to individual beautiful objects, in a manner 
which may be taken as descriptive of the relation of each idea to the individual objects 
corresponding to it. In contradistinction to beautiful bodies, arts, sciences (καλὰ σώματα, 
ἐπιτηδεύματα, μαθήματα), he terms the idea of the beautiful, the beautiful per se (αὐτὸ τὸ 
καλόν), and applies to it the predicates uncorrupted, pure, unmixed (εἰλικρινές, καθαρόν, 
ἄμικτον). This Beautiful per se is eternal, without origin or decay, neither increasing nor 
decreasing, remaining absolutely like itself (κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχον, μονοειδὲς ἀεὶ dv), not in one 
respect beautiful, but in another ugly; not now beautiful, but at another time not so; not 
beautiful in comparison with one object, but, in comparison with another, ugly; not appear- 
ing beautiful in one place or to certain persons, but in another place or to other persons 
ugly. Neither can it be represented by the fancy, as if it were a material thing; nor is it a 
(subjective) conception or a form of knowledge (οὐδέ τις λόγος, οὐδέ τις ἐπιστήμη) ; it is not in 
any other object, nor in any living being, not on earth nor in the heavens, but it exists as a 
substance of and by itself (αὐτὸ xa? αὑτὸ μεθ' αὑτοῦ). Every thing else that is beautiful 


\ 


120 PLATO'S DIALECTIC. 


participates in it (ἐκείνου peréyer). According to Rep., p. 523 seq., those sensible objects, 
which appear in one respect small, in another large, etc., and, in short, all those objects to 
which contrary predicates appear applicable, are the occasion of our calling in the aid of 
reason for their consideration; reason solves the contradiction, by separating those con- 
traries which appear united (forming a συγκεχυμένον͵ concretum, a concrete object), conceiving 
Greatness as an idea by itself, and Smallness, in like manner, as another, and, in general, 
viewing the opposed predicates apart (τὰ δύο κεχωρισμένα). Analogous to this are the 
explanations given in the Phaedo (p. 102): Simmias is large in comparison with Socrates, 
small in comparison with Phedo; but the idea of largeness and also the property of large- 
ness are never at the same time identical with smallness; on the contrary, the idea 
Temains permanently what it is, and so does the quality, unless it ceases to exist. The 
idea has with the individual objects corresponding to it a certain community (κοινωνία), it is 
present with them (παρουσία); but the character of this community (which, according to 
the comparison in the Republic between the idea of the Good and the sun, may be con- 
ceived as analogous to the community between the sun and the earth, through the rays 
of the former extending to the latter) Plato declines more precisely to define (Phaedo, 
Ῥ. 100d: ὅτε οὐκ ἀλλο τι ποιεῖ αὐτὸ καλὸν ἢ ἐκείνου τοῦ καλοῦ εἴτε παρουσία εἴτε κοινωνία 
[εἴτε] ὅπη δὴ καὶ ὅπως προσγενομένη, for which προσγενομένου is probably to be read). 
Tim., p. 51 seq. (cf. Rep., V. 474 seq.): If scientific cognition and correct opinion (νοῦς and 
δόξα ἀληθής) are two different species of knowledge, then there exist ideas which possess 
absolute being and are cognizable, not through sense-perception, but only by thought (edn 
νοούμενα); but if, as it appears to some, both are identical, then the talk of ideas is mere 
talk (λόγος, or perhaps: ideas are nothing objective, they are simply subjective conceptions), 
and only the sensible exists. But in fact both are different, both in their origin (through 
conviction ;—through persuasion) and in their nature (certainty and immutability ;—uncer- 
tainty and change). There are, therefore, also two different classes of objects: the one 
includes that which remains perpetually like itself, has not become and can not pass away, 
never from any source receives any thing into itself, nor itself passes into any thing else (oie 
εἰς ἑαυτὸ εἰσδεχόμενον ἀλλο ἄλλοθεν, οὔτε αὐτὸ εἰς GAAS ποι ἰόν); the other class covers the 
realm of individual objects, which are homonymous (ὁμώνυμα) with the ideas and similar 
(ὑμοια) to them, which become and perish at definite places, and are always in motion (πεφορη- 
μένον asi). The difference between knowledge, on the one hand, and sensible perception 
and correct opinion, on the other, is considered at length and demonstrated in the dialogue 
Theaetetus. The (fantastical) tendency, which in the Platonic theory of ideas accompanies 
the logically legitimate recognition of a relation in the subjective conception to objective 
reality, culminates in the Sophisies (p. 248), with the attribution to ideas of motion, life, 
animation, and reason. This tendency to hypostatize or give substance to that phase of 
objective reality, which is known through the concept, appears, however, not to have been 
pushed to this extreme by Plato, but by a fraction of his Pythagorizing disciples, who (ac- 
cording to Soph., 248b) were often disputing with an opposite fraction, and among whom 
the inclination to hypostatize and personify abstractions was strongest. From the stand- 
point reached in the Platonic exposition—which was marked by the free and natural inter- 
play of fancy, even in the severest operations of thought, so that in it doctrines scientifically 
valid appear interwoven with poetic fiction—an advance in one of two directions was pos- 
sible. Hither the poetic element could be critically sifted out and the doctrine of ideas 
could be transformed into the doctrine of the essence or essential nature known through and 
corresponding with the concept (ἡ κατὰ λόγον ovoia)—which was done by Aristotle—or the 
poetic element might, and did, become dogmatically fixed and, in scholastic fashion, seem- 
ingly rationalized, as by some of the Platonists, in the Sophistes and Politicus, until its 


PLATO’S DIALECTIC. 121 


inevitable replacement by Skepticism took place, as in the Middle Academy and in the 
dialogue Parmenides. This dialogue may have been composed in the time immediately 
following Plato’s death, but perhaps not till the time of the Middle Academy, and it 
finds a tenable position neither in the admission nor in the rejection of the ideas and 
the One. 

Myths, in which the truly existent was represented in the form of the perpetually 
becoming and the psychical in the form of the perceptible, were employed by Plato as a 
means of facilitating in his readers the subjective apprehension of his doctrines; they were 
also a necessary element in the poetico-philosophical style of Plato; but the dialectical 
method was considered as alone adequate to the object-matter of pure philosophical cog- 
nition. The allegorical or mythical style was possible in treating of the ideal itself, and 
for the representation of its relation to the sensible it was in so far necessary for Plato, 
as he was unable, on account of the (as Deuschle terms it) “not genetical, but ontical” 
(ontological) character of his doctrine of ideas, to conceive this relation in a purely 
scientific form; but the cognition and representation of the sensible was, according to 
Plato, necessarily not figurative, but only probable. Such were the εἰκότες μῦθοι (Tim., 
p. 59 et al.), with which Plato believed we must content ourselves in the department 
of natural philosophy, while dialectic in all its rigor could be applied only in the 
field of ethics and in the investigation of cognition and the ideas. Owing to the char- 
acter which Plato thus ascribed to natural philosophy, the style appropriate to it 
was that of continuous discourse; hence in the Timaeus Plato could and was obliged 
to content himself with this style, which may have been already employed by the 
Pythagoreans. 

It is impossible, according to the dialogue Cratylus, that the consideration of words 
should be of assistance in the investigation of the essence of things, because the con- 
structors of language were not sufficiently acquainted with the true and permanent essence 
of things, but remained satisfied with the popular opinion, which Heraclitus afterward ex- 
pressed in its most general form, but which, in fact, is true only of objects of sense, viz.: 
that all things are in constant movement. 

The two cognitive processes, which together constitute the dialectical procedure, are 
described by Plato (Phaedr., 265 seq.) as the collective consideration of separate individuals 
and their reduction to unity of essence, on the one hand, and, on the other, the resolution 
of unity into plurality, following the order that exists in nature. The first process finds 
its term in definition, or the knowledge of the essence of the thing defined (and accord- 
ingly in Plato, Rep., VII. 534, he is termed a dialectician, who attains to this conception of 
the essence, τὸν λόγον λαμβάνοντα τῆς οὐσίας); the second is the division of the generic 
concept into its subordinate specific concepts. In Rep., VI. p. 510, VIL. p. 533, Plato con- 
trasts deduction, which, from certain general presuppositions, that are, however, not neces- 
sarily ultimate or expressive of first principles, derives conclusions that depend on them, 
with the process of rising to the unconditioned (éx’ ἀρχὴν ἀνυπόθετον, which principle, since 
it is absolutely the highest, can not serve as a basis for a further progress), a process 
which is accomplished by the suppression of all that is merely hypothetical. The 
former procedure rules, according to Plato, in the mathematics, the latter in philosophy. 
In the Phaedo (p. 101d) it is recognized as legitimate in a’ philosophical investigation 
to base provisional inferences on ὑποθέσεις. but it is requisite that these hypotheses 
be themselves subsequently justified, by being deduced from others more general and 
more nearly approaching the nature of principles, till at last the investigation finds its 
legitimate terminus in the ἱκανόν͵ viz., the absolutely highest and self-demonstrating 
conception. 


122 PLATO'S DIALECTIC, 


Plato, recapitulating, schematizes as follows, De Rep., VII. pp. 509 seq. and 533 seq. : 


A. OBJECTS. 


Νοητὸν γένος (οὐσία). 
"Idéaz, | Μαθηματικά. 


Ὁρατὸν γένος (γένεσις). 
Σώματα. | Εἰκόνες. 





Β. WAYS OF KNOWING. 
Νόησις. | Δόξα. 
Νοῦς (or νόησις or ἐπιστήμη). | Διάνοια. Πίστις. | Eikaoia. 


The highest object of knowledge (μέγιστον μάθημα) is the idea of the good (Rep., VI. 
505 a). This idea is supreme in the realm of νοούμενα and difficult of cognition; it is the 
cause of all truth and beauty. To it objects owe their being and cognoscibility and the 
mind its power of cognition (Rep., VI. 508 seq.). It is superior to the Idea of Being, 
Rep., VI. p. 509 Ὁ: καὶ τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις τοίνυν μὴ μόνον τὸ γιγνώσκεσθαι (the power of 
being known) φάναι ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ παρεῖναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν (being, 
taken predicatively) ὑπ’ ἐκείνου αὐτοῖς προσεῖναι, οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ ἔτι 
ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὔσίας πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει ὑπερέχοντος (the Idea of Good bestows not only 
cognoscibility, but also being; it is not identical with being, but, on the contrary, is 
exalted above it). Every thing which exists and is knowable, has received from God, 
who is the Idea of the Good, its existence and its ability to be known, because he knew 
that it was better that it should exist, than that it should not exist (cf. Phaedo, p. 97 c). 
(So far as we are to understand by “being,” objective being or objective reality, ἀλήθεια, 
this being is not the most general idea, but is inferior in generality to the Good.) In the 
Philebus (p. 22) the Idea of the Good is identified with the divine reason. The general 
character of the Platonic teaching requires us to identify it also with the world-builder 
(δημιουργός), who (according to Tim., 28 seq.), the absolutely good, contemplating the ideas 
(i. e., himself and the other ideas), makes all generated things, as far as practicable, 
also good. 

Of the reduction of the ideas to (ideal) numbers, of which Aristotle speaks, some traces 
are found in certain of the later dialogues, mostly in the Philebus, i which the ideas are 
termed ἑνάδες or μονάδες, and (in Pythagorizing fashion) πέρας and ἄπειρον are considered 
as elements of things. Akin to this doctrine is the doctrine of the different elements of the 
world-soul, in the Timaeus, and of “the same” (ταὐτὸν) and “the other” (θάτερον) in the 
Sophistes. According to the Aristotelian accounts (Metaph., 1.6; XIV. 1, 1087 Ὁ, 12 e¢ al, 
also in the fragments of the works De Bono and De Jdeis), as also according to Hermodorus 
(Simplic., Ad Arist. Phys., fol. 54b and 56b), Plato posited two elements (στοιχεία) as 
present in the ideas and in all existing things, namely, a form-giving (πέρας) and a form- 
receiving, and, in itself, formless element (ἀπεερον), but the ἄπειρον, or infinite, which the 
Pythagoreans had already opposed to the πεπερασμένον, or the finite, was divided by Plato 
into a duad, namely, into the great and small (or more and less). In every class of objects 
(ideas, mathematical and sensible objects) Plato seems to have assumed such elements, and 
to have regarded the objects themselves as a mixture of both elements (μικτόν). In the 
things which are perceived by the senses the ἄπειρον appears to represent the matter which 
constitutes them (described in the Timaeus), and the πέρας their shape and quality. In 
the soul of the world the πέρας is the singular, self-identical (ταὐτὸν) and indivisible 
(ἀμερές) element, and the ἄπειρον the heterogeneous (θάτερον) and divisible (μεριστόν) one. 
In numbers and geometrical figures and in the ideas πέρας represents unity (ἔν), while of 
the ἀπείρον several kinds are distinguished: as being the “indefinite duad” (ἀόριστος dvac), 


PLATO’S PHYSICS. 123 


the great and small constitute the form-receiving element or substratum (the ὕλη), from 
which through the ἔν numbers are formed; long and short, broad and narrow, high and 
low, are the species of the great and small, from which the form-giving principle, whose 
nature is unity, produces lines, surfaces, and solids (Arist., Metaph., XIII. 9). From the 
One and from the ἄπειρον, when divided into the duad of great and small,numbers arise, 
says Aristotle (Metaph., I. 6), in a natural manner (εὐφυῶς); but the derivation of the ideas 
from these depends on the reduction of the ideas to numbers. From these (ideal) numbers 
Plato distinguishes the numbers of mathematics, which stand between the ideas and 
sensible things. The ideal numbers seem to have had with Plato essentially the sense 
of expressions to denote higher and lower degrees of generality and—what was for him 
the same thing—higher and lower degrees of worth; a relation of succession (a πρότερον 
καὶ vorepov) subsisted among them, but they could not be added (ἀξύμβλητο). The ἔν 
(the One) was identified by Plato with the idea of the good (according to Aristotle, ap. 
Aristox., Harm. Element, II. p. 30, Mezb., cf. Arist., Met., I. 6, XIV. 4). 


§ 42. The world (ὁ κόσμος) is not eternal, but generated; for it is 
perceptible by the senses and is corporeal. Time began with the 
world. The world is the most beautiful of all generated things; it 
was created by the best of artificers and modeled after an eternal 
and the most excellent of patterns. Matter, which existed from 
eternity, together with God, being absolutely devoid of quality and 
possessing no proper reality, was at first in disorder and assumed a 
variety of changing and irrational shapes, until God, who is abso- 
lutely good and without envy, came forth as world-builder, and 
transformed all for ends of good. He formed first the soul of the 
world, by creating from two elements of opposite nature, the one 
indivisible and immutable, the other divisible and mutable, a third 
intermediate substance, and then combining the three in one whole, 
and distributing this whole through space in harmonious proportions. 
To the soul of the world he then joined its body. In thus bringing 
order and proportion to the chaotic and heaving mass of matter, he 
caused it to assume determinate mathematical forms. The earth 
arose from cubiform elements, and fire from elements having the 
shape of pyramids; between these two came, as intermediate terms 
of a geometrical proportion, water, whose elements are icosahedral in 
form, and air, with octahedral elements. The dodecahedron is re- 
iated to “2 iorm of the universe. Plato knew of the inclination 
of the ecliptic. Of the elements of the world-soul, the better, 7. ¢., 
the unchangeable element, was distributed by the Demiurgus in the 
direction of the celestial equator. The other, the changeable element, 
he placed in the direction of the ecliptic. The divine part of the hu- 
man soul, having its seat in the head, was made like the world-soul. 


124 PLATO'S PHYSICS. 


The first or indivisible element of this soul in man is, as in the soul 
of the world, the instrument of rational cognition, the other element 
is the organ of sensuous perception and representation. With the 
soul, whose seat is in the head, are combined in man two other 
souls, which Plato in the Phaedrus seems to conceive as pre-existing 
before the terrestrial life of man, but in the 7imaeus describes as tied 
to the body, and mortal. These are the courageous soul (τὸ θυμοειδές, 
irascibility), and the appetitive soul (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν, disposition to 
seek for sensual pleasure and for the means of its gratification). 
Thus the whole or collective soul resembles the composite force of a 
driver and two steeds. The appetitive soul is possessed also by 
plants, and courage is an attribute of the (nobler) animals. The soul 
in general (according to the Phaedrus), or the cognitive soul alone 
(according to the Zimacus) is immortal. With this doctrine Plato - 
connects (in the Phaedo, which contains his arguments for immor- 
tality) the ethical admonition to seek, through a life of purity and 
conformity to reason, the only possible deliverance from evil, and also 
a number of “probable arguments” in support of the doctrines of 
the transmigration of the soul through the bodies of men and animals 
for a cosmical period of ten thousand years, of the purification of 
those who were good citizens, but not philosophers, of the temporary 
punishments of sinners who are not past all healing, of the eternal 
damnation of incurable offenders, and of the blessedness of those whose 
lives were pre-eminently pure and pleasing to God. 


The following authors (in addition to the editors and commentators of the 7imaeus and the historians 
of Greek philosophy) treat especially of the Platonic theology: Marsilius Ficinus (Theologia Platonica, 
Florence, 1482), Puffendorf (De tieol. Pl., Leipsic, 1653), Oelrichs (Doctr. Pl. de deo, Marburg, 1788), Horstel 
(Pi. doctr. de deo, Leipsic, 1804), Theoph. Hartmann (De diis Tim. Pl., Breslau, 1840), Krische (Forschun- 
gen I1., pp. 181-204), J. Bilharz (Ist Pls Speculation Theismus? Carlsruhe and Freiburg, 1842), Heinr. 
Schirmann (De deo Plat., Minster, 1845), Ant. Erdtinan (De deo et ideis, Minster, 1855), H. L. Ahrens 
(De duodecim deis Pl., Hanover, 1864), G. F. Rettig (atria im Philebus die persini. Gottheit des Plato, 
oder: Plato kein Pantheist, Berne, 1866), and Karl Stumpf ( Verhdliniss des Platonischen Gottes zur 
Idee des Guten, in the Ztschr. f. Philos., Vol. 54, Nos. 1 and 2, Halle, 1869, published also separately). 
Cf., also, the works on Plato’s doctrine of ideas, cited above, § 41. 

Plato’s Natural Philosophy is discussed by the various editors and translators of the Timaeus, among 
whom Chalcidius (of the fourth century a. D.; his translation, together with Cicero’s translation of a part 
of the Timaeus, is edited by Mullach, in Vol. 2 of his Fragm. Philos. Graec., Paris, 1867, pp. 147-258), of 
ancient translators, and Martin (Ztudes sur le Timée de Platon, 2 tom., Paris, 1841), among modern trans- 
Jators are the most important; also, in particular, by Aug. Boeckh (De Plat. corporis mundani fabrica, 
Heidelb., 1809, and De Plat. system. coelestiwm globorwm et de vera indole astronomiae Philolaicae, ibid. 
1810, both which works are printed in the third volume of the complete works of Boeckh, edited by Εἰ 
Ascherson, Leipsic, 1866, accompanied with many additions; see also B.'s Untersuchungen iiber das kos- 
mische System des Platon mit Bezug auf Gruppes “ Kosmische Systeme der Griechen,” Berlin, 1852), 
Reinganum (Pls Ansicht von der Gestalt der Erde, in the Ztschr. 7: die A. Wiss., 1841, No. 90), J. 8. 
Konitzer (Ueber Verhdltniss, Form und Wesen der Elementarkorper nach Plato's Timaeus, Neu-Ruppin, 
1846), Wolfgang Hocheder (Das kosmische System des Plato mit Bezug auf die neuesien Auffassungen dew 


PLATO’S PHYSICS. 125 


selben, Progr., Aschaffenburg, 1855; ef., per contra, Susemihl, in Jahrb. f. cl. Philol., Vol. 5, 1857, pp. 
598-602), A. Hundert (De Platonis altero rerwm principio, Progr., Cleve, 1857), Felix Bobertag (De 
materia Pl. quam fere vocant meletemata, Breslau, 1864), Franz Susemihl (Zur Platonischen Escha. 
tologie und Astronomie, in the Philologus, Vol. XV., 1860, pp. 417-434), G. Grote (Plato's Doctrine re- 
specting the Rotation of the Earth and Aristotle's Comment upon that Doctrine, London, 1860; German 
transl. by Jos. Holzamer, Prague, 1861; ef., on this work by Grote, Heinr. y. Stein, in the Gétt. Ane., 1862, 
Ρ. 1438, Friedr. Ueberweg, in the Zettschr. f. Philos., Vol. XLII., 1863, pp. 177-182, and particnlarly Boeckh, 
in the third volume of his collected works, 1866, pp. 294-820), C. Goebel (De coelestibus ap. Plat. motibus, 
G.-Pr., Wernigerode, i869). 

On the Psychology of Plato: Aug. Boeckh (Ueber die Bildung der Weltseele 4m Timaeua, in Daub and 
Creuzer's Studien, Vol. III., 1807, pp. 1-95, repr. with suppl. in the 8d vol, of his Ges. kl. Schriften, Leips. 
1566, pp. 109-180), Herm. Bonitz (Disput. Plat. Duae: dean. mund. elem., see aboye, § 41), F. Ueberweg 
(Ueber die Platonische Weiltseele, in the Rhein. Mus. f. Ph., new series, Vol. 1X., 1858. pp. 87-84), Franz 
Susemihl] (Platon. Forschungen, 111.. in Philologus, Supplementband 11. Heft 2, 1861, pp. 219-250), 
Chaignet (De la psychologie de Platon, Paris, 1862), J. P. Wohlstein (Materie und Weltseele in dem 
Plat. System, Inaug.-Diss., Marburg, 1863), Hartung (Auslegung des Marchens von der Seele, I., Erfurt, 
1866). 

On the Platonic doctrine of immortality and the related doctrines of pre-ewistence and reminiscence : 
Joach, Oporinus (Histor. crit. doctr. de immortalitate, Hamb. 1735, p. 185 seq.), Chr. Ernst yon Windheim 
(Zzamen argumentorum Pl. pro immort. animae hum., Gott. 1749), J. C. Gottleber (Argum. aliquot in 
Pl. Phaedone de anim.immort. discussio, spec., I-IV., Altdorf, 1765-67), Moses Mendelssohn (Piddon, 
1st edition, Berlin, 1764), Gust. Fried. Wiggers (Hxamen argum. Pl. pro. imm. anim. hwm., Rostock, 1803), 
F. Pettavel (Disp. Acad., Berlin, 1815), Kunhardt (Ueber Pl. Phaedon, Liibeck, 1817), Adalb. Schmidt 
(Argum. pro imm. anim., Halle, 1827; Pl.'s Unsterblichkeitslehre, Progr., Halle, 1835), J. W. Braut 
( Ueber die ἀνάμνησις, Brandenb. 1832), C. F. Hermann (De immortalitatis notione in Plat. Phaed., Marb. 
1835; De partibus animae immortalibus sec. Platonem, Gott. 1850), Ludw. Hase (Pr., Magdeb. 1843), 
Voigtlinder (De animorum praeewistentia, Diss., Berlin, 1844), K. Ph. Fischer (Pl. de immort. an. doctr., 
Erlangen, 1845), Herm. Schmidt (G.-Progr., Wittenb. 1845; Halle, 1850-52; Zur Kritik und Erkl. v. Pl.’s 
Phaedon, in the Philol., V. 1850, p. T10 seq.; Zeitschr. 7. Gymn.- Wesen, Il. 1848, Nos. 10 and 11, and VI. 
1352, Nos. 5, 6,7; Pls Phaedon erkl., G.-Pr., Wittenberg, 1854), Franz Susemihl (Philologus, Ὑ. 1850, p. 
385 seq.; Jahn’s Jahrb., Vol. 73, 1856, pp. 236-240; Philologus, XV., and Suppl., Vol. IL, 219 seq.) M. 
Speck (G.-Pr., Breslau, 1853), L. H. O. Miller (Die Eschatologie Plato’s und Cicero’s im Verhiltniss 
zum Ohristenthum, Jever, 1854), K. Eichhoff (€.-Pr., Duisburg, 1854, pp. 11-18), A. J. Kahlert (@.-Pr. von 
Czernowitz, Vienna, 1855), Ch. Prince (Pr., Neufchatel, 1859), Bucher (P/. spec. Bew f. d. Unsterbl. der 
menscht. Seele, Inaug. Diss., Gitt. 1861), Drosihn (Die Mythen iiber Prd- und Post-Ewistenz, G.-Pr., 
Céslin, 1861), K. Silberschlag (Die Grundlehren Pl. tiber das Verhiltniss des Menschen zu Gott und das 
Leben nach dem Tode in ihrer Beziehung zu den Mythen des Alterthwms, in the Deutsch. Mus., 1862, 
No. 41), F. Gloél (De argumentorum in Plat. Phaedone cohaerentia, G.-Pr., Magdeb. 1868). Alb. Bischoff 
(Pla Phaedon eine Reihe von Betrachtungen zur Erkldrung und Beurtheilung des Gesprachs, Er- 
langen, 1866; cf. F. Mezger, in the Zeitschrift fiir luth. Theologie, 1868, No. 1, pp. 80-86), A. Boelke ( Veber 
Pls Beweise fiir die Unsterbl. der Seele Rostock and Berlin, 1869), Paul Zimmermann (Die Unsterdl. 
der Seele in Plato's Phaedo, Leipsic, 1869). 


Plato opens the exposition of his physics in the Tim. (p. 28 seq.) with the affirmation 
that since the world bears the form of γένεσις (development, becoming) and not that of 
true being (οὐσία), nothing absolutely certain can be laid down in this field of investigation, 
but only what is probable (eixére¢ μῦθοι). Our knowledge of nature bears not the charac- 
tars of science (ἐπιστήμη) or of the knowledge of truth (ἀλήθεια), but those of belief (πίστις). 
Plato says (Tim., p. 29c): “What being is to becoming, that is truth to faith” (5, τε zep 
πρὸς γένεσιν οὐσία, τοῦτο πρὸς πίστιν ἀλήθεια). What Plato says in the Phaedo, p, 114 ἃ, 
explains his idea of the probable: ‘Firmly to assert that this is exactly as I have expressed 
it, befits not a man of intelligence; yet that it is either so or something like it (ὅτε ἢ ταῦτ᾽ 
ἐστιν ἢ τοιαῦτ᾽ ἄττα) must certainly be assumed. 

Plato raises in Tim., p. 28 a, the question whether the world is without origin, eternal 
ab initio, or whether it had a beginning, and answers it by saying, that on account of the 
visibility of the world, the second, and not the first, alternative must be adopted as the 
truth. But the world is the best of generated, as its author is of eternal existences. 


126 PLATO'S PHYSICS. 


God’s goodness is the reason of the construction of the world. Phaedrus, p. 247a: “ Envy 
stands outside of the divine choir.” Timaeus, Ὁ. 29 6: He (God) was good; but the good 
are never envious with regard to any thing. Being, therefore, without envy, he planned 
all things so that they should be as nearly as possible like himself:” ἀγαθὸς ἦν (ὁ δημιουρ- 
yéc, the supreme God, the constructor of the world), ἀγαθῷ δὲ οὐδεὶς περὶ οὐδενὸς οὐδέποτε 
ἐγγίγνεται φθόνος. τούτου δ᾽ ἐκτὸς ὧν πάντα ὅτι μάλιστα ἐβουλήθη γενέσθαι παραπλήσια αὑτῷ. 
(Cf. also Arist., Metaph., I. 2, p. 988 Ὁ, 2. Yet the notion of the envy of the gods, which 
Plato and Aristotle combat, involves also an ethical and religious element in so far as by 
“envy” it is intended to indicate the reaction of the universal order against all individual 
disproportion or excess.) 

The adaptation and order of the world have their ground in the world-constructing 
reason; whatever of blind necessity is manifest in it arises from the nature of matter. 
Mechanical causes are only ξυναίτια (concomitants) of the final causes. 

When matter (as δεξαμένη, or form-receiving principle) assumed orderly shapes, there 
arose first the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Between the two extremes, fire 
and earth, of which the former was necessary for the visibility, the latter for the palpa- 
bility of things, a bond of connection was needed; but the most beautiful of bonds is pro- 
portion, which in the present case, where solid bodies are concerned, must be twofold. 
(In the case of plane figures one intermediate term is sufficient; the side of a square, 
whose contents are the double of a given square, is determined by the proportion 
1:a%::@: 2, where ὦ = v2, the side of the given square being = 1; and this given square, 
whose contents =1 x 1, is to the rectangle, one of whose sides = 1, the other = ¥2, 
and whose contents therefore = 1 x 42, as the latter is to the square whose con- 
tents = v2 x 72 = 2. But in the case of solids, two intermediate terms are necessary ; 
the length of the side of a cube whose contents = 2, is determined by the two propor- 
tions: ]:a::%:y, and w:y::y:2, where s—*y2andy= *¥ 2’, and the cube, whose 
contents = 1 x 1 x ], is to the parallelopiped, whose contents = 1 x 1 x *y2,as the 
latter is to the parallelopiped =1 x ὃ 7/2 x ὃ 4/2; and the latter again stands in a like relation 
to the cube whose contents = ὅγ2 x °v2 x ὃν = 2. Whatever is true, in this respect, 
of squares and cubes, is applicable to all mutually similar forms, though only to such. 
A comprehensive and exact examination and explanation of all these relations is given by 
Boeckh in the Comm. acad. de Platonica corporis mundani fabrica confiati ex elementis 
geometrica ratione concinnatis, Heidelberg, 1809, reprinted in Boeckh’s Ges. kl. Schr., Vol. 
III., pp. 229-252, together with an annexed Excursus, pp. 253-265.) Fire must accord- 
ingly be related to air, as air to water, and air to water, as water to earth. 

The distances of the celestial spheres from each other are proportioned to the different 
lengths of the strings which produce harmonious tones. The earth is at rest in the center 
of the universe. It is wound around the (adamantine) bar or distaff (ἡλακάτη), which 
Plato (according to Grote, doctrinally, according to Boeckh, mythically) represents as 
extending from one end of the axis of the world to the other; the sky and also the 
planets revolve around this distaff once in every twenty-four hours; but the planets have 
besides a motion peculiar to themselves, which is occasioned by the σφόνδυλοι, which lie 
about the spindle and together constitute the whorl, since these, while participating in the 
revolving motion of the heavens, rotate at the same time, but more slowly, in the opposite 
direction; the earth remains unmoved. If the distaff (Λλακάτη) of the spindle (a@tpaxroc) is 
conceived as motionless (as it is by Boeckh), the earth is to be regarded as simply rolled 
into a ball around it and firmly attached to it; but if it is included in the daily rotation of 
the heavens, the earth must not be conceived (as it is by Grote) as partaking in this motion, 
but the (absolute) rest of the earth must be explained by a (relative) motion of the same 


PLATO'S PHYSICS. 127 


around the distaff in the opposite direction. If the distance of the moon from the earth 
is represented by 1, then that of the sun = 2, that of Venus = 3, that of Mercury = 4, 
that of Mars = 8, that of Jupiter = 9, that of Saturn = 27. The inclination of the ecliptic 
is explained by Plato as a result of the inferior perfection of the spheres underneath the 
sphere of the fixed stars. According to a statement of Theophrastus (see Plutarch., Plat. 
Qu., 8, ef. Numa, ch. 11), Plato in his old age no longer attributed to the earth (but to the 
central fire probably) the occupancy of the center of the world; this account, in itself alto- 
gether credible as an oral utterance of Plato, is nevertheless not easily reconciled with the 
fact that in the Leges—which was written after the Fep., and beyond question also after 
the Timaeus, and that, too, according to late but apparently trustworthy tradition, not by 
Plato, but by Philip the Opuntian, from a sketch made by Plato—the doctrine contained 
in the Timaeus is reaffirmed. Cf. Boeckh, Das kosmische System des Plato, Berlin, 1852, 
pp. 144-150. 

The soul of the world is older than its body; for its office is to rule, and it is not 
fitting that the younger should rule the older. It must unite in itself the elements of all 
orders of ideal and material existences, in order that it may be able to know and under- 
stand them (Zim., p. 34 seq.). Plato says (Tim., p. 35 seq.), that the Indivisible in the soul 
enables it to have knowledge of the ideas, while the Divisible mediates its knowledge of 
sensible objects. The third or mixed element may be considered as the organ of mathe- 
matical knowledge (or perhaps of all particular, distinct acts of cognition?) These cogni- 
tive faculties pertain exclusively to that part (λογιστικόν) of the human soul which resides 
in the head. 

The hypothesis that the human soul has three parts (ἐπιθυμητικόν, θυμοειδές͵ λογιστικόν) 
seems to have been framed in intentional correspondence with the natural gradation: plant, 
animal, man (Tim., 77b; Rep., IV. 441 Ὁ); this distinction, however, of the orders of the 
natural kingdom was not so distinctly marked or attended to by Plato as by Aristotle. 
The supremacy of each of these different parts, taken in their order, is illustrated in the 
gain-loving Phenicians and Egyptians, the courageous Barbarians of the North, and the 
culture-loving Hellenes (Rep., IV. 435 6 to 436 a). 

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is founded by Plato, in the Phaedrus (p. 245), 
on the nature of the soul, as the self-moving principle of all motion; in the Rep. (X. 609), 
on the fact, that the life of the soul is not destroyed by moral badness, which yet, as the 
natural evil and enemy of the soul, ought, if any thing could effect this, to effect its 
destruction; in the Tim. (p. 41), on the goodness of God, who, notwithstanding that the 
nature of the soul, as a generated essence, subjects it to the possibility of destruction, can 
not will that what has been put together in so beautiful a manner should again be dis- 
solved; in the Phaedo, finally (pp. 62-107), this doctrine is supported, partly by an 
argument drawn from the nature of the subjective activity of the philosopher, whose 
striving after knowledge involves the desire for incorporeal existence, @. e., the desire to 
die, and partly on a series of objective arguments. The first of these arguments is founded 
on the cosmological law of the transition of contraries into each other, according to which 
law, just as the living die, so the dead must return to life; the second, on the nature of 
knowledge, as a species of reminiscence (cf. Meno, p. 80 seq., where the pre-existence of the 
soul is inferred from the nature of the act of mathematical and philosophical learning, 
whose only satisfactory explanation, it is argued, is found in the hypothesis of the soul's 
recollection of ideas which had been perceived by the intellect in a pre-terrestrial life); the 
third, on the relationship between the soul, as an invisible essence, and the ideas, as 
invisible, simple, and indestructible objects; the fourth argument, in reply to the objection 
(of Simmias), that the soul is perhaps only the résultante and, as it were, the harmony of the 


,198 PLATO'S ETHICS. 


functions of the body, is based partly on the previously demonstrated pre-existence of the 
soul, and partly on the qualification of the soul to rule the body, and on its nature as a sub- 
stance, so that, says Plato, while one harmony can be more a harmony than another, one 
soul can not be more or less soul than any other, and the soul, if virtuous, may have har- 
mony for its attribute ; the fifth argument, finally, and the one which Plato himself deemed 
decisive, was in reply to the objection (of Cebes), that although the soul perhaps survived 
the body, it might yet be not absolutely indestructible, and was founded on the necessary 
participation of the soul in the idea of life, whence the inference that the soul can never be 
lifeless, a dead soul would be a contradiction, and consequently immortality and imper- 
ishableness must be predicated of it. In this argument, it is assumed that that, whose 
nature is such that, so long as τὲ exists, it neither is nor can be dead, can never cease to 
exist; this assumption is connected with the double sense in which ἀθάνατος is employed, 
a. in the sense, which results from the general tenor of the argument, viz.: not dead; ὁ. in 
the sense corresponding to ordinary usage: immortal, 


§ 48. The highest good is, according to Plato, not pleasure, nor 
knowledge alone, but the greatest possible likeness to God, as the 
absolutely good. The virtue of the human soul is its fitness for its 
proper work. It includes various particular virtues, which form a 
system based on the classification of the faculties or parts of the 
human soul. The virtue of the cognitive part of the soul is the 
knowledge of the good, or wisdom (σοφία) that of the courageous 
part is valor (ἀνδρία), which consists in preserving correct and legiti- 
mate ideas of what is to be feared and what is not to be feared; the 
virtue of the appetitive part is temperance (moderation or self-control, 
self-direction, σωφροσύνη), which consists in the agreement of the 
better and worse parts of the soul, as to which should rule; justice, 
finally (δικαιοσύνη), is the universal virtue, and consists in the fulfill- 
ment by each part of its peculiar function. Piety (ὁσιότης) is justice 
with reference to the gods. One of the ramifications of wisdom is 
philosophical love, or the joint striving of two souls for the attain- 
ment of philosophical knowledge. Virtue should be desired, not 
from motives of reward and punishment, but because it is in itself 
the health and beauty of the soul. To do injustice is worse than to 
suffer injustice. 

The state is the individual on a large scale. The highest mis- 
sion of the state is the training of the citizens to virtue. In the ideal 
state each of the three principal functions and corresponding virtues 
of the soul is represented by a particular class of citizens. These are, 
1) the rulers, whose virtue is wisdom; 2) the guardians or warriors, 
whose virtue is valor; and 3) the manual laborers and tradesmen, 
whose virtue is self-restraint and willing obedience. The rulers and 


PLATO'S ETHICS. ™ 129 


warriors are to labor only for the realization of the true and the 
good ; all individual interests whatsoever are forbidden them, and they 
are all required to form in the strictest sense one family, without mar- 
riage and without private property. The condition of the realization 
of the ideal state is that philosophers should at some time become 
rulers, or that rulers should philosophize rightly. The Laws contains 
a later draught by Plato of the second-best form of the state, which, 
he says, it would be more easy to realize. In this scheme, the theory 
of ideas disappears from the programme for the education of the 
rulers, and the chief stress is laid on their mathematical schooling ; 
the kind of religious worship here prescribed was also less alien to 
the general beliefs of the Hellenic people, and marriage and private 
property were allowed as a concession to individual interests. 

In the Platonic state, that Art alone finds a place which consists 
in the imitation of the good. In this category are included philo- 
sophical dramas, such as Plato’s own dialogues, the narration of 
myths (expurgated and ethically applied), and, in particular, reli- 
gious lyrics (containing the praises of gods and also of noble men). 
All art which is devoted to the imitation of the phenomenal world, 
in which good and bad are commingled, is excluded. Art and the 
Beautiful hold their place in Plato’s system only in subordination to 
the good. The Beautiful, whose essence lies, according to Plato, in 
the fitness and symmetry resulting from the relation of the concept 
to the plurality of phenomena, is nevertheless for him, though not the 
highest of ideas, yet that one which imparts to its sensible copies the 
highest brilliancy, since it, most of all ideas, shines through its copies. 

The education of youth was regulated by Plato in accordance with 
the principle of a gradual advance to the cognition of the ideas and 
to the corresponding practical activity in the state, so that only the 
best-qualified persons could rise to the highest stations, while the rest 
were destined to exercise inferior practical functions. The cognition 
of the idea of the good was reserved as a final topic of instruction 
for the most mature. 


The following authors, in addition to the authors cited above, ad § 41, treat of Plato’s Ethics and 
Politics in their relation to the national character of the Greeks and to Christianity : Grotefend (Commentatio 
tn qua doctrina Platonis ethica cum christiana comparatur ita, ut utriusque tum consensus, tum dis- 
crimen exponatur, Gott. 1821}, I. Ogienski (Pericles et Plato, Breslau, 1888), Jul. Guil. Ludw. Mehlis 
(Comparatio Plat. doctrinae de rep. cum christiana de regno divino doctrina, Gott. 1845), K. F. Her- 
mann (Die hist. Elemente des Platon. Staatsideals, Gitt. 1849, pp. 132-159), P. F. Stuhr ( Vom Staatsleben 
nach Platon., Arist. und christlichen Grundsdtzen, Part I., Berlin, 1850), Ed. Kretzschmar (Der Kampf 
des Plato wm die relig. und sittlichen Principien des Stuatslebens, Leipsic, 1852), W. Wehrenpfennig 
(Die Verschiedenheit der ethischen Principien bei den Hellenen, Berlin, 1856, p. 40 seq.), W. Wiegand 


9 


130 PLATO’S ETHICS. 


(Kinleitung in Plato's Gottesstaat fiir Freunde der Akademie, G.-Pr., Worms, 1858), Ed. Zeller (Der 
Platon. Staat in seiner Bedentung fiir dée Folgezeit, in Von Sybel’s Hist. Zeitschr., Vol. 1... 1859, No. 1, 
pp. 108-126, and in Zeller’s Vortr. τι. Abh. gesch. Inhalts, Leipsic, 1865, pp. 62-81), Hildenbrand (@esch. w. 
System der Rechts und Staatsphilosophie, Leipsic, 1860, I. 151 seq., 156 seq., 166 seq.), S. Lommatzsch 
(Quomodo Pl. et Arist. relig. ac reip. principia conjunrerint, Diss. Inaug., Berlin, 1863), Eman. 
Grundey (De Plat. principiis ethicis, Diss. Inaug., Berlin, 1865); an essay on the leading characteristics 
of Plato’s theory of the state is contained in Glaser’s Jahrb. fiir Gesellschafts- und Staatswissenschaften, 
Vol. VI., No. 4, 1866, pp. 809-318; cf. also Bertrand Robidou, Za Rép. de Platon, comparée auw idées et 
aux états modernes, Paris, 1869. 

On Plato’s doctrine of the highest good, cf. Ad. Trendelenburg (De Pl. Philebi consilio, Berlin, 1887), 
Theod. Wehrmann (Plat. de swmmo bono doctrina, Berlin, 1848), Wenkel (Pl. Lehre vom h. G. und der 
Glickseligkeit, G.-Pr., Sondershausen, 1857), G. Loewe (De bonorum apud Platonem gradibus, Diss. 
Halensis, Berlin, 1861), Franz Susemihl (Ueber die Giitertafel im Philebus, in the Philologus, Suppl. 
Vol. 11., Gottingen, 1863, pp. 97-132), Rud. Hirzel (De bonis in πε Philebi enumeratis, Diss. Berolinen- 
sis, Leipsic, 1868). 

On his doctrine of pleasure, cf. O. Kalmus (Halberstadt, 1857), H. Anton (in Fichte’s Zeitsehr. f. 
Philos., new series, Vol. 83, Halle, 1858, pp. 65-81 and 218-288), W. R. Kranichfeld (Platonis et Arist. de 
ἡδονῇ sententiae guomodo tum consentiant, tum dissentiant, Berlin, 1859), W. Kister (in the Progr. of 
the Sophien-gymnasium at Berlin, 1868). 

On his doctrine of justice: W. Ogienski ( Welches ist der Sinn des Platonischen τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν Υ͂ 
Progr., Trzemeszno, 1845), W. Jahns (Inawg. Diss., Breslau, 1850), and J. F. Amen (} 1. de justitiae doctrina, 
G.-Pr., Berlin, 1854). ; 

On his doctrine of σωφροσύνη : K. Hoffmeister (Essen, 1827); and on his doctrine in regard to falsehood: 
Th, Kelch (Disqu. in Pl. de mendacio doctr. [De Rep., 11. 111.1, Elbing, 1820). 

On Plato’s theory of the state, cf. Cri. Morgenstern (De Plat, rep. commentationes tres, Halle [Bruns- 
wick], 1794), C. L. Pérschke (De Plat. poetas e rep. bene const. esse expell., Kinigsb. 1803), G. de Geer 
(Pol. Plat. princip., Diss., Utrecht, 1810), Friedr. Képpen (Politik nach Pl. Grundsdtzen, Leipsic, 1818, 
Rechtslehre nach Pl. Grds., ibid. 1819), Havyestadt (De eth. et pol. disciplinae in Pl. dial. cohaerentia, 
Inaug.-Dissert., Minster, 1845), Voigtland (Die eth. Tendenzen des Pl. Staats, G.-Pr., Schleusingen, 
1858). On Plato’s politics as compared with Aristotle’s, see Gust. Pinzger (De tis, quae Ar. in Pl. Politia 
repr., Leipsic, 1822), and others (see below, ad §50); the mutual relation of Plato’s Politics and Ethics 
is also discussed in various compositions relating to the Platonic dialogue De Republ., particularly in the 
Introductions to that dialogue by Schleiermacher, Stallbaum, and Steinhart, in Susemihl’s work, Vol. IL., 
p. 58 seq., and in monographs by A. G. Gernhard (in the Act. soc. Graecae, 1.. Leipsic, 1886; Pr., 
Weimar, 1837; zbid. 1829, 1840), E. Manicus (G.-Pr., Schlesw. 1854), G. F. Rettig (Prolegom. ad Plat. 
remp., Berne, 1845, und Ueber Steinhart’s, Susemihl’s und Stallbawm’s Einl, z. Pl. Staat, in the Rhein. 
Mus., new series, XVI. 1861, pp. 161-197), A. O. Wigand (Das zeweite Buch des Piaton. Gottesstaates, 
oder Plato’s eigene Ansicht von dem Wesen der Gerechtigkeit, Worms, 1868); also in writings relative 
to the Politicus, especially the Introductions of the various editors, and in Deuschle’s Beitrage zur 
Erkl. des Pol. (G.-Pr.), Magdeb. 1857; ef. A. H. Raabe, De poetica Pl. philos. natura, praesertim in 
amoris expositione conspicwa, Rotterdam, 1866. Of the community of goods in Plato’s theory, E. v. 
Voerthuysen has treated (Utrecht, 1850); cf. Thonissen (Le Socialisme, t. I., Paris, 1852, p. 41 seq.). On the 
principles of criminal law, according to Plato, see Platner, in the Zettschr. fiir Alterthwmswiss., 1844, 
Nos. 85 and 86. 

On Plato’s mwsthetics, cf. Ed. Miller (Ueber das Nachahmende in der Kunst nach Plato, Ratibor, 
1881; Geschichte der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten, Breslau, 1834, pp. 27-129), Arnold Ruge (Die Plat. 
Aesthetik, Halle, 1832), Wilh. Abeken (De μιμήσεως apud Platonem et Arist. notione, Gott. 1836), Rassow 
(Ueber die Beurtheilung des Homerischen Epos bei Plato und bei Aristoteles, Stettin, 1850), Ch. Léyéque 
(Platon, fondatewr de Vesthetique, Paris, 1857), K. Justi (Die dsthet. Elemente in der Platonischen 
Phitlos., Marburg, 1860), Th. Striter (Studien zur Geschichte der Aesthetik, Heft 1: Die Idee des Schonen 
bei Plato, Bonn, 1861; cf. Boumann’s review of this work in Michelet’s Journal Der Gedanke, Vol. VI., 
Berlin, 1865, pp. 14-25), Jos. Reber (Pl. und die Poesie, Inaug.-Diss., Munich, 1864), Max Remy (Pi. 
doct. de artibus liberal., Halle, 1864), A. H. Raabe (De poetica Plat. philos. natura, in amoris expositione 
conspicua, Rotterdam, 1866), C. yon Jan (Die Tonarten bei Pil., in the NV. Jahrb. f Ph. und Péd., 95, 1867, 
pp. 815-826). 

On Plato’s doctrine of education, cf. Anne den Tex (De οἱ musices ad excol. hom. e sent. Plat., Utr. 
1816), G. A. Blume (De Platonis liberorum educ. disciplina, Halle, 1818), Ch. Schneider (De gymnastica 
in civ. Plat., Breslau, 1817), Ad. Bartholom. Kayssler (Fragmente aus Plato's und Goethe’s Pddagogik, 
Breslau, 1821), C. Stoy (De auctoritate in rebus paedag. a Plat. civ. principibus tributa, Jen. 1882), 
Alexander Kapp (Platon’s Hrziehungslehre, Minden, 1888), Wiese (Jn optima Plat. civitate qualis sit 





ῬΙΙΑΤΟΒ ETHICS. 131 


puerorum institutio, Prenzlay. 1834), E. Snethlage (Das ethische Princip. der Plat, Erziehung, Berlin, 
1884), W. Baumgarten-Crusius (Disciplina juwenilis Plat. cwm nostra comp., Meissen, 1836), K. H. Lach- 
mann (Plat. Vorst. von Recht und Erziehung, Hirschberg, 1849), Arens (Die relig. Erziehung des Plat. 
Staatsbiirgers, Oldenburg, 1853), Bomback (Lntwickelung der Plat. Erziehungslehre, Rottweil, 1854), Vol- 
quardsen (Plat. Idee des persénl. Geistes und seine Lehren tiber Erziehung, etc., Berlin, 1860), Baunard 
(Quid apud Graecos de institutione puerorum senserit Plato, Orléans, 1860), Hahn (Die pddagog. 
Mythen Plato's, Parchim, 1860), L. Wittmann (2rziehung und Unterricht bei Plato, Giessen, 1568), Cuers 
(Pl. u. Arist. Ansichten iiber den pidagog. Bildungsgehalt der Kiinste, in the N. Jahrb. 7. Philol. und 
Padag., Vol. 98, 1868, pp. 521-558). 


The possession of the Good, according to Plato, is happiness (Sympos., 240 e: κτήσει 
yap ἀγαθῶν οἱ εὐδαίμονες εὐδαίμονες. Sympos., p. 202 6: εὐδαίμονας τοὺς τἀγαθὰ καὶ καλὰ 
κεκτημένους. Cf. Gorg., p. 508 Ὁ. : δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης κτήσει εὐδαίμονες οἱ εὐδαίμονες, 
κακίας δὲ οἱ ἄθλιοι ἀθλιοι). Happiness depends on culture and justice or on the possession of 
moral beauty and goodness (Gorg., p. 470d). Rep., IV. p.420b: “Our object in found- 
ing the state is, that not a class, but that all may be made as happy as possible.” The 
ethical end of man is described by Plato as resemblance to God, the absolutely good, in 
Rep., X. 613 a; Theaet., 176. Through his psychological doctrine of the different faculties 
or parts of the soul, Piato was enabled to do what for other disciples of Socrates, such 
as Euclid and Antisthenes, was, as it seems, impossible, viz.: to demonstrate a plurality 
of virtues as comprehended within the one general conception of virtue. The parallel 
between virtue in the state and in the individual is introduced by Plato with the remark, 
that in the former we read, as it were, in larger characters the same writing, which in 
the latter is written in smaller ones (fep., II. p. 368). 

The Platonic theory of the state borrows many of its special provisions from the Hel- 
lenic, and especially from the Doric legislation. But its essential tendency is not (as K. F. 
Hermann and others affirm) toward the restoration and intensification of the Old-Hellenic 
principle of the unreflecting subordination of the individual to the whole. It is rather an 
advance upon all Hellenic forms whatever and an anticipation of institutions which were 
afterward approximately realized, notably in the Hierarchy of the Middle Ages.* 


* As Plato’s theory of ideas points beyond the sensible phenomenon and sees the truly real only in 
absolutely existent essences, exalted above time and space and figured as dwelling beyond the heavens, so 
Plato’s ethico-political ideal points beyond the terrestrial ends of political society (on which, however, the 
genesis of the state originally depends, ?ep., II. p. 369 seq.) to the cognition and realization of a transcend- 
ent ideal good. The sensible may, indeed, participate in the ideal: the latter may shine through the former 
and lend 10 proportion and beauty (Phaedr., Sympos.); but the ultimate and supreme duty of man is, 
nevertheless, to escape from the sensible world to the ideal (Zheaet., p. 176a: πειρᾶσθαι χρὴ ἐνθένδεν 
ἐκεῖσε φεύγειν ὅτι τάχιστα, by which is attained ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν). Thus, while the class of 
philosophers in the state are not, indeed, to pass their lives in pure contemplation alone, and while they are 
not to have their own ideal good only in view, but are to have a care for their fellow-citizens who exercise 
the inferior functions, their supreme destination and at the same time their fullest satisfaction are to be 
found in contemplation itself. culminating in cognition of the idea of the good (Rep., VIL. p. 519). Plato 
seeks to assure the supremacy of the idea in the state, not by requiring the consciousness of all to be filled 
and permeated by it, and so developing a universal community of mind and spirit, but by providing a par- 
ticular class, who are to live for it, and to whom the other classes owe unconditional obedience, the members 
of that class being alienated from sensible and individual interests by the extermination of these interests, 50 
far as possible. Precisely the same motives gave rise, at a later epoch, to the Medieval Hierarchy. If it be 
assumed that Platonism was among the causes which led to the development of that hierarchy, its influence 
must be conceived as mainly indirect and exerted through the doctrines of Philo, the Neo-Platonists, and 
the Church Fathers, all of whom had been especially attracted and influenced by the Platonic doctrine of 
the ultra-phenomenal world. But an equally influential cause was the example of the Jewish hierarchy. 
Whatever judgment may be passed on the question of historic dependence, and setting aside many specific 
differences, the general character of the Platonic state and that of the Christian Hierarchy of the Middle 
Ages are essentially the same. In the former the philosophers occupy nearly the same position with refer- 
ence to the other classes which in the latter the priests occupied with reference to the laity. In ordering 


132 PLATO’S ETHICS. 


In Plato’s ideal state it was impossible that ancient Greek art, especially the Homeric 
poetry, whicn ran vounter to Plato’s rigid conception of moral dignity in the control of the 
passions, should find a place. If the phenomenal is an imitation of the ideal, that art, 
which in turn imitates the phenomenal, can only be of inferior worth. Only that art 
which imitates the good can be recognized as fully legitimate. Beauty is the shining of 
the ideal through the sensible. The Idea, which is the One as opposed to the plurality of 
phenomena, manifests itself in the phenomenal in the relations of proportion. The deri- 
vation of beauty from the ideal is emphasized by Plato in the Phaedrus, Symposion, and 
Republic, while its formal side is especially considered in dialogues of later composition 
(Timaeus and Philebus ; Hippias Major is probably spurious). 

The various forms of government are ranked in the Republic as follows: The Ideal 
State (government of the philosophically cultivated), Timocracy (ascendency of the θυ- 
μοειδές over the λογιστικόν, of military prowess over culture), Oligarchy (participation ir 
the government conditioned on the amount of one’s possessions, which minister to ἐπιθυμία, 
Democracy (freedom, abolition of distinctions of worth), Tyranny (complete perversion of 
justice through the supremacy of the bad). In the Politicus, six forms are enumerated, in 
the following order: Monarchy (legal government of one individual), Aristocracy (legal 
government of the rich), Legal Democracy, Illegal Democracy, Oligarchy (lawless goveru- 
ment of the rich), Tyranny (lawless government of one person). The character of the 
citizens coresponds naturally with the character of the government. To take part in the 
government of bad states is impossible for the philosopher, because it would degrade him, 
So long as such states continue to exist, he can only withdraw himself from public life, 
and lead, in the company of a few friends, a life of contemplation (Theaet., p. 173 seq. ; 
compare what is said, perhaps in opposition to Isocrates, in Rep., VI. p. 487 seq., respect- 
ing the reason why the ablest philosophers could be of no service to the states as then 
actually constituted). 

For the education of the children of the rulers and warriors of the ideal state, Plato 
provides in the Rep. as follows: From the Ist to the 2d year, care of the body; from 3 to 
6, narration of myths; from 7 to 10, gymnastics; from 10 to 13, reading and writing; from 
14 to 16, poetry and music; from 16 to 18, mathematical sciences; from 18 to 20, military 
exercises. Then follows a first sifting. Persons possessing an inferior capacity for 
science, but capable of bravery, remain simply warriors; the rest go on, until the age of 
30, learning the sciences in a more exact and universal form than was possible in their 
earlier, youthful years. In this period, topics previously learned separately are appre- 
hended in their mutual relations as parts of one whole; this at the same time furnishes 
the test of the talent for dialectic, for the dialectician must be able to comprehend many 
things in one view (ὁ yap ξυνοπτικὸς διαλεκτικός ἐστιν). Then comes a second sifting. 
The less promising are assigned to practical public offices. The rest pursue, from the age 
of 30 to 35, the study of dialectic, and then assume and hold positions of authority until 
the 50th year. After this they attain finally to the highest degree in philosophy, the con- 
templation of the idea of the good; at the same time they are received into the number of 
rulers and fill in turn the highest offices of the state, being charged with the superin- 
tendence of the entire government. Most of the time in this last period of their lives 
they are permitted to devote to philosophical contemplation. 
the strict subordination of the individual to the whole, the Platonic state agreed no less with the Grecian 
state in its early historic form than with the Church of the Middle Ages. But in the kind and the sense of 
the subordination thus required it was more akin to the latter. For the subordination required by the 
Platonic state is by no means unreflecting, bounded by mere custom and subserving simply the power and 


greatness of the state. It rests on the authority of a finished system of doctrines, and its tendency is, in 
the highest degree, toward the promotion of purely spiritual ends. 


THE OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ACADEMIES. 133 


§ 44. It is the custom of historians to distinguish, among the pro- 
fessed disciples of Plato, three, or, by a more circumstantial division, 
five consecutive tendencies or schools. These are the Old, Middle, 
and New Academies: the Old Academy including the first school, the 
Middle Academy including the second and third schools, and the 
New Academy, the fourth and fifth. To the first Academy belong: 
Speusippus, Plato’s sister’s son and the successor of Plato as Scho- 
larch (which office he held from 347 to 339), who pantheistically 
represents the Best or Divine as first indeed in rank, but as chrono- 
logically the last product of development, and who finds the principle 
of ethics in the happiness of a life conformed to nature; Xenocrates 
of Chalcedon, who succeeded Speusippus in the directorship of the 
Academy (339-314), and who identifies ideas with numbers, and 
founds on the doctrine of numbers a mystical theology; Heraclides 
of Pontus, who distinguished himself especially in astronomy, teach- 
ing the daily rotation of the earth on its axis from West to East and 
the immobility of the firmament of the fixed stars; Philip the Opun- 
tian, author of the Apinomis (which is a continuation of the Laws of 
Plato); Hermodorus, who was likewise one of Plato’s immediate dis- 
ciples, and who contributed to the spread of Plato’s doctrines, espe- 
cially his unwritten ones; and Polemo, Crantor, and Crates, who 
redirect attention chiefly to ethical inquiries. In the Middle Academy 
a skeptical tendency becomes more and more prominent. The heads 
of this Academy were Arcesilas (815-241 3. o.), the founder of what 
is called the second Academy, and Carneades (214-129), the founder 
of the third Academic school. The New Academy returned to Dog- 
matism. It commenced with Philo of Larissa, founder of the fourth 
school, who lived at the time of the first Mithridatie war. His pupil, 
Antiochus of Ascalon, founded a fifth school by combining the doc- 
trines of Plato with certain Aristotelian and more particularly with 
certain Stoic theses, thus preparing the way for the transition to Neo- 
Platonism, 


On the Old Academy, οἵ. Zeller, Ph. ἃ. Gr., 2d ed., 11. a, pp. 641-698. On Speusippus, Ravaisson, 
Speusipp. Plac., Paris, 1888; M. A, Fischer, De Sp. vita, Rast. 1845; Krische, For'schungen, I. pp. 247-258. 
On Xenocrates: Wynpersse, Diatribe de Xenocrate Chalcedonio, Leyden, 1822; Krische, Forschungen. I. 
pp. 811-824, On Heraclides: Roulez, De Vit. et Scriptis Heraclidis Pontici, Louvain, 1828; E. Deswert, De 
Heraclide Pont., ibid. 1830; Franz Schmidt, De Heruclidae Pont. et Dicaearchi Messenii dialogis deper- 
ditis (Diss. Inaug.), Breslau, 1867 ; cf. Miller, Fragm. Hist. Gr., ΤΙ. p. 197 seq. ; Krische, For'schungen, 1. pp. 
$24-836. On Eudoxus: L. Ideler, Ueber’ Eudowus, in the Abh. der Berl. Akad d. Wiss., 1828, 1830; Aug. 
Boeckh, Ueber die vierjahrigen Sonnenkreise der Alten, vorztiglich den EHudowischen, Berlin, 1868; cf., 
George Cornewall Lewis, Historical Survey of the Ancient Astronomy, ch. III., sect. 8, p. 146 seq. On 
Eudoxus of Onidus, the geographer (about 255 Β. c.), Who must be distinguished from Eudoxus the philoso- 


184 THE OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ACADEMIES, 


pher, and who was the author of a γῆς περίοδος, as also on Geminus the astronomer (about 187 B. ©.), ef. H. 
Brandes, in the Jahrb. f. Ph., LXV. 1852, p. 258 seq., and in the Jahrb. des Vereins fiir Erdkunde zu 
Leipzig, Leips. 1866. On Hermodorus, cf. Ed. Zeller, De Hermodoro Ephesio et Hermodoro Platonis dis- 
eipulo, Marb. 1859. On Crantor: Εἰ. Schneider, De Orantoris Solensis philosophi Academicorum philo- 
sophiae addicti libro, qui περὶ πένθους inscribitor commentatio, in the Zeitschr. fiir die Alterthumswiss, 
1836, Nos. 104, 105; M. Herm. Ed. Meier, Ueber die Schrift des Krantor περὶ πένθους, Halle, 1840; Frid. 
Kayser, De Crantore Academico diss., Heidelb., 1841. On the later Academics: Fr. Dor. Gerlach, Com- 
mentatio exhibens Academicorum juniorum, imprimis Arcesilae atque Carneadis de probabilitate 
disputationes, Gott. 1815; I. Rud. Thorbecke, In dogmaticis oppugnandis numquid inter academicos et 
scepticos interfuerit, Zwollae Batay., 1820; Rich. Brodersen, De Arcesilao philosopho academico, Altona, 
1821; Aug. Geffers, De Arcesila (G.-Pr.). Gott. 1841; Id., De Arcesiliae successoribus, ibid. 1845; ef. Zeller, 
Ph. ἃ. Gr., 2d ed., III. a, p. 448 seq.; Roulez, De Carneade, annal. Gandav., 1824-25; C.J. Grysar, Die 
Academiker Philo und Antiochus, Cologne, 1849; C. F. Hermann, Disputatio de Philone Larrissaeo, 
Gott. 1851; Disput. altera, ibid. 1855; Krische, in the Οὐδέ. Stud., 11. 1845, pp. 126-200; Zeller, Ph. ἃ. 
Gr., 2d ed., III. a, p. 522; David d’Allemand, De Antiocho Ascalonita, Paris, 1856; cf. Krische, Gott, Stud., 
II. 160-170; Zeller, Ph. ἃ. Gr., 2d ed., III. a, pp. 530-540. 


That Speusippus was the immediate successor of Plato in the leadership of the Acad- 
emy is testified by Diog. L., IV.1. Aristotle not unfrequently makes mention of his 
opinions, especially in the Metaph., but often without naming him; he expressly ascribes to 
him, with the Pythagoreans, a doctrine of pantheistic character (Metaph., XII. 7: ὑπολαμ- 
Bavovow ... οἱ ἸΤυϑαγόρειοι καὶ Σπεύσιππος, τὸ κάλλιστον καὶ ἄριστον μὴ ἐν ἀρχῇ εἶναι, διὰ τὸ 
καὶ τῶν φυτῶν καὶ τῶν ζώων τὰς ἀρχὰς αἴτια μὲν εἷναι, τὸ δὲ καλὸν καὶ τέλειον ἐν τοῖς ἐκ τούτων). 
According to Stob., Ecl., I. p. 58, he rejected the (Platonic) identification of the one (ἕν), the 
good (ἀγαθόν), and the reason (νοῦς). He assumed (like Pseudo-Philolaus, who perhaps 
followed his example, but who, however, illogically joined the doctrine of this assumption 
with other heterogeneous doctrines) a rising gradation of existences, positing the abstract 
as the earliest and most elementary, and the more concrete as later and higher. Aristotle 
says (Met., VII. 2) that Speusippus, commencing with the ‘‘One” (ἕν), assumed a greater 
number of classes of essences than Plato, and that for each class, namely, for numbers, 
the geometrical figures, and the soul, he posited different principles. Speusippus seems to 
have denied the existence of Ideas (whereas Xenocrates identified them with mathematical 
objects). The soul was defined by him (Stob., Hcl. Phys., I. 1; Plut., De Anim. Proer., 22) as 
extension shaped harmoniously by number, hence, as in some sense, a higher unity of the 
arithmetical and the geometrical. According to Cic. (Nat. D., I. 13) he assumed a vis ani- 
malis, qua omnia regantur. His ethical principle is thus expressed by Clem. Alex. (Stvom., 
II. 418 d): Σπεύσιππος τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν φησὶν ἕξιν εἶναι τελείαν ἐν τοῖς κατὰ φύσιν ἔχουσιν, 
ἢ ἕξιν ἀγαϑῶν. 

Xenocrates of Chalcedon (396-314 Β, 6.) distinguished (according to Sext. Empir., Adv. 
Math., VII. 147) three classes of essences: the sensible, the intelligible, and the inter- 
mediate, the latter being the objects of opinion (δόξα); the intelligible lay beyond the 
heavens (ἐκτὸς οὐρανοῦ), the sensible within the heavens (ἐντὸς οὐρανοῦ), while the δοξαστόν, 
or matter of opinion, was identical with the heavens themselves, since these could be both 
perceived and scientifically contemplated. (To him are to be referred the words in Arist., 
Met., VII. 2: ἔνιοι δὲ τὰ μὲν εἴδη καὶ τοὺς ἀριϑμοὺς τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχειν φασὶ φύσιν, τὰ dé ἀλλα 
ἐχόμενα, γραμμὰς καὶ ἐπίπεδα, μέχρι πρὸς τὴν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ οὐσίαν καὶ τὰ αἰσϑητά). Out of 
the “‘One” and the ‘Indefinite Duad” he constructed all existences (Theophrast., Jet., 3, 
p. 312). He defined the soul as self-moving number, ἀριθμὸν αὐτὸν ὑφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ κινούμενον 
(Plut., De An. Procr., 1, ef. Arist., De An., 1. 2,4; Analyt. Post., II. 4). In the symbolical 
use of the names of the gods, Xenocrates indulged in an almost childish play. Happiness 
was described by him (according to Clem., Strom., II. p. 419 a) as resulting from. our pos- 
session of the virtue proper to us (οἰκείας ἀρετῆς) and of power devoted to its service, 


THE OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ACADEMIES. 135 


Among the earliest disciples of Plato belongs Eudoxus of Cnidus, who was subse- 
quently distinguished as a mathematician and astronomer (and lived about 406-353 B. c.). 
He heard Plato perhaps about 383, and went to Egypt probably about 378 (not first in 362) 
with a letter of recommendation from Agesilaus to King Nektanebus. At Heliopolis he 
studied astronomy; at Tarentum, under Archytas, geometry ; and in Sicily, under Philistion, 
medicine (as Diog. L., VIII. 86, reports, following the Πίνακες of Callimachus). He after- 
ward taught in Cyzicus and Athens, and finally returned to Cnidus, his native city, where 
he erected an astronomical observatory. At Athens Menaechmus and Helicon were 
among his pupils in geometry; Helicon accompanied Plato in his third voyage to Sicily 
(361 B. c.; see Pseudo-Plat., Hp., XIII. p. 360d; Plutarch, Dion., ch. 19). In ethics 
Hudoxus maintained the Hedonic doctrine (Arist., Eth. N., X. 2, 3). 

Heraclides of Heraclea on the Pontus, to whom (according to Suidas) Plato intrusted 
the direction of the Academy during his last journey to Sicily, occupied himself, among 
other things, with the question thus propounded (according to Simplic., Jn Arist. De Coelo, 
f. 119) by Plato (in a form distinguished for its logical merits): τίνων ὑποτεθεισῶν ὁμαλῶν 
καί τεταγμένων κινήσεων διασωθῇ τὰ περὶ τὰς κινήσεις τῶν πλανωμένων φαινόμενα, or “ what 
uniform and regulated motions can be assumed (to explain the phenomena of the universe), 
whose consequences will not be in contradiction with the phenomena.” The form of this 
question gives evidence of a consciousness already very highly developed, of the correct 
method of investigation, and-involves only the error of supposing that mathematical 
regularity as such necessarily belongs to the actual movements of nature, so that the 
research for real forces, from whose activity these motions arise, seemed unnecessary. 
Eudoxus is said to have proposed several hypotheses in reply to the above Platonic ques- 
tion, but decided in favor of the immobility of the earth. Heraclides, on the contrary (with 
Eephantus the Pythagorean, whom he also followed in his doctrine of atoms), decided for 
the theory of the revolution of the earth on its axis (Plut., Plac. Philos., III. 13). Hera- 
clides regarded the world as infinite in extent (Stob., Hcl., I. 440). 

Hermodorus was an immediate pupil of Plato, and we are indebted to him for a number 
of notices respecting the life and doctrines of his master (see above, § 39, p. 100, and 
§ 41). From his work on Plato, Dercyllides (see below, § 65) borrowed data relative to 
the Platonic Stoicheiology. Perhaps it was these “unwritten doctrines” which constituted 
the λόγοι, with which Hermodorus traded in Sicily, whence the saying to which Cicero 
alludes (Ad Ait., XIII. 21: λόγοισιν ‘Epuddwpoc Eurropeverat). 

Philip the Opuntian, the mathematician and astronomer (cf. Boeckh, Sonnenkreise, p. 
34 seq.),is the reputed author of the Epinomis. The revision and publication of the manu- 
script of the Leges, which was left by Plato unfinished, are also ascribed to him (Diog. L., 
IL. 37, and Suidas sub voce φιλόσοφοι). 

Polemo, who followed Xenocrates as head of the school (314-270), gave his atten- 
tion mainly to ethics. He demanded (according to Diog. L., IV. 18) that men should 
exercise themselves more in right acting than in dialectic. Cicero gives (Acad. Pr., 11. 43) 
the following as his ethical principle: honeste vivere, fruentem rebus iis, quas primas homini 
natura conciliet. To his intiuence on Zeno, Cicero bears witness, De Fin., TV. 16, 45. 

Crantor is termed by Proclus (Ad Tim., p. 24) the earliest expounder of Platonic 
writings. As the living tradition of Plato’s doctrines died out, his disciples began 
more and more to consult his written works. Crantor’s work on Sorrow (περὶ πένθους) 
is praised by Cicero (Tusc., I. 48, 115; cf. III. 6,12). He assigns (in a fragment, ap. 
Sext. Empir., Adv. Math. XI. 51-58) the first place among good things to virtue, the 
second to health, the third to pleasure, and the fourth to riches. He combats the Stoic 
requirement that the natural feelings should be suppressed (in accord with Plat., Rep., 


136 THE OLD, MIDDLE, AND NEW ACADEMIES. 


X. 603e). Crantor died before Polemo (Diog. Laer., IV. 27). Crates directed the school 
after Polemo. 

The successor of Crates was Arcesilas or Arcesilaus, who was born, about 315 B. c., at 
Pitane in Adolia, and had at first attended upon the instructions of Theophrastus, but after- 
ward became a pupil of Crantor, Polemo, and Crates, Of his habit of abstaining (ἐποχὴ) 
from judgment and of disputing on both sides, Cicero tells us (De Orat., III. 18: quem ferunt 
primum instituisse, non quid tpse sentiret ostendere, sed contra id quod quisque se sentire diaisset, 
disputave; cf. Diog. L., IV. 28: πρῶτος dé εἰς ἑκάτερον ἐπεχείρησεν). He is said (Cic., 
Acad. Post., I. 12) to have taught that we can know nothing, not even the fact of our 
inability to know. But this (according to Sext. Emp., Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 234 seq., and others) 
was only for the discipline and testing of his pupils, to the best-endowed of whom he was 
accustomed afterward to communicate the Platonic doctrines. Of this explanation (ac- 
cepted by Geffers, disputed by Zeller) we may admit that, in view of the nature of the 
case, it is credible, in so far as a head of the Academy could hardly break at once and 
completely with the theory of ideas and the doctrines founded on it; only this explanation 
does not necessarily imply an unconditional assent to that theory and to those doctrines. 
According to Cic., Acad. Post., I. 12, Arcesilas combated unceasingly the Stoic Zeno. He 
contested especially (according to Sext. Emp., Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 233 seq., Adv. Math., VII. 
153 seq.) the κατάληψις and συγκατάθεσις of the Stoics (see below, § 53), yet recognized the 
attainability of the probable (τὸ εὔλογον), and found in the latter the norm for practical 
conduct. Aristo, the Stoic, parodying Jliad, VI. 181, said (according to Diog. L., IV. 33, 
and Sext. Emp., Pyrrhon. Hypotypos., I. 232) that Arcesilas was: 


πρόσθε Πλάτων, ὕπιθεν ἸΤύρρων, μέσσος Διόδωρος, 


or, ‘‘ Plato in front, Pyrrho behind, amd Diodorus in the middle.” 

Arcesilas was followed in the leadership of the school (241 B. 0.) by Lacydes, Lacydes 
(in 215) by Telecles and Evander, the latter by Hegesinus, and he by Carneades. 

Carneades of Cyrene (214-129; he came as an embassador to Rome in the year 155 
B. C., together with Diogenes the Stoic and Critolaus the Peripatetic) went still farther in 
the direction of Skepticism. He disputed, in particular, the theses of Chrysippus the Stoic. 
Expanding the skeptical arguments of Arcesilas, he declared knowledge to be impossible, 
and the results of dogmatic philosophy to be uncertain. His pupil, Clitomachus (who fol- 
lowed him in the presidency of the School, 129 B. 6.), is related (Cic., Acad. Pr., II. ch. 45) 
to have said: “it had never become clear to him what the personal opinion of Carneades 
(in ethics) was.” Cicero (De Orat., I. 11) calls Carneades, as an orator, hominem omnium 
in dicendo, ut ferebant, acerrimum et coptosissimum. While at Rome he is said to have 
delivered on one day a discourse in praise of justice, and on the next to have demonstrated, 
on the contrary, that justice was incompatible with the actual circumstances in which men 
live, and in particular to have hazarded the observation, that if the Romans wished to 
practice justice in their political relations, they would be obliged to restore to the rightful 
owners all that they had taken away by force of arms, and then return to their huts 
(Laetant., Jnst., V. 14 seq.). To the doctrine of cognition his most important contribution 
was the theory of probability (ἔμφασις, πιθανότης) He distinguished three principal 
degrees of probability: a representation may be, namely, either 1) probable, when con- 
sidered by itself alone; or 2) probable and unimpeached, when compared with others; 
or 3) probable, unimpeached, and in all respects confirmed (Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math., 
VII. 166), 

Philo of Larissa, a pupil of Clitomachus, came in the time of the first Mithridatie 
war to Rome, where Cicero heard him (Cic., Brut, 89). He appears to have given hia 


ARISTOTLE’S LIFE. 137 


attention chiefly to Ethics, and, in treating the subject, to have inclined toward the 
method of the Stoics, although remaining in general their opponent. 

Antiochus of Ascalon, Philo’s disciple, sought to show that the chief doctrines of the 
Stoics were to be found already in Plato (Sext. Emp., Pyrrh. Hyp., I. 235). He differed 
from the Stoics in rejecting the doctrine of the equality of all vices, and in holding that 
virtue alone, though producing a happy life, is not productive of the happiest of lives; in 
other respects he agreed with them almost entirely (Cic., Acad. Pr., 11. 43). 


§ 45. Aristotle, born 384 8. c. (Olymp. 99.1) at Stagira (or Sta- 
geiros) in Thrace, and son of the physician Nicomachus, became in 
his eighteenth year (367) a pupil of Plato, and remained such for 
twenty years. After Plato’s death (347) he repaired with Xenocrates 
to the court of Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia. 
He remained there nearly three years, at the expiration of which 
time he went to Mitylene and afterward (343) to the court of Philip, 
king of Macedonia, where he lived more than seven years, until the 
death of that monarch. He was the most influential tutor of Alexan- 
der from the thirteenth to the sixteenth years of the life of the latter 
(8438-340). Soon after Alexander’s accession to the throne, Aristotle 
founded his school in the Lyceum, over which he presided twelve 
years. After the death of Alexander, the anti-Macedonian party at 
Athens preferred an accusation against Aristotle, for which religion 
was called upon to furnish the pretext. To avoid persecution, Aris- 
totle retired to Chalcis, where he soon afterward died, Olymp, 114.8 
(322 B. oc.) in the sixty-third year of his age 


On the life of Aristotle, compare Dionys. Hal., Zpist. ad Animaewm, I. 5; Diog. Laért., V. 1-85; 
Suidas (the work edited by Menagius agrees in its biographical part word for word with the first and 
larger part of the article by Suidas; but there is appended to it a list of the writings of Aristotle, which 
reproduces, with some omissions and some additions, the catalogue of Diogenes Laértius; ef. Curt 
Wachsmuth, De Fontibus Suidae,in Symbola philol. Bonnensiwm, I. p. 188); (Pseudo-) Hesychius; 
(Psendo-) Ammoninus, Vita Avist., with which the Vita e cod. Marciano, published by L. Robbe, Leyden, 
1861, agrees almost throughout; an old Latin work on the life of Aristotle, ed. Nunnez, Barcelona, 1594, 
Leyden, 1621, 1631, Helmst. 1666, is a third redaction of the same Vita. The Biographies of Aristotle 
by Aristoxenns, Aristocies, Timotheus, Hermippus, Apollodorus, and others are lost. The chronology 
of Aristotle’s life, as given by Diogenes L., is taken from the χρονικά of Apollodorus; Dionys. Halic. 
appears to have drawn from the same source. J. G. Buhle, Vita Aristotelis per annos digesta, in the 
first volume of the Bipontine edition of the works of Aristotle. Ad. Stahr, Avistote/ia (Part I., on the 
life of Aristotle of Stagira), Halle, 1880. George Henry Lewes, Aristotle, a Chapter from the History of 
Science, London, 1864 (translated into German by Victor Carus, Leipsic, 1865); the first chapter is on the 
life of Aristotle. Cf. Aug. Boeckh, Hermias von Atarneus, in the Abh. der Akad. der Wiss. hist.-phil. 
Οἷ., Berlin, 1858, pp. 133-157. 

On Aristotle’s relations with Alexander, cf. K. Zell (Arist. als Lehrer des Alewander, in: Ferien- 
schriften, Freiburg, 1826), Frid. Guil. Car. Hegel (De Aristotele et Alerandro magno, Berlin, 1887), 
P. C. Engelbrecht (Ueber die wichtigsten Lebenswmstiinde des Aristoteles und sein Verhiltniss eu 
Alexander dem Grossen, besonders in Beziehung auf seine Naturstudien, Eisleben, 1845), Rob. Geier 
(Alewander und Aristoteles in ihren gegenseitigen Beziehungen, Halle, 1856), Egger (Aristote considéré 
comme précepteur @ Alewundre, Caen, 1862, Hxtrait des Mém. de Acad. de Caen), Mor. Carriére (Adewan- 
der und Aristoteles, in Westermann’s Monatsh., Febr., 1865). 


138 ARISTOTLE’S LIFE. 


Not only Aristotle’s father, but also his ancestors, were physicians; they traced their 
pedigree to Machaon, the son of Asclepius. The father, Nicomachus, resided as physician- 
in-ordinary at the court of the Macedonian king Amyntas at Pella. From a comparison 
of the statements respecting the time of Aristotle’s death, and his age at that time, as also 
respecting the age of Aristotle at the time of his coming to Athens and the date of his con- 
nection with Plato, it appears probable that his birth occurred in the first half of the Olym- 
piadic year, hence in 384 Β. c. Soon after the first arrival of Aristotle in Athens, Plato 
undertook his visit to Dio and the younger Dionysius, from which he returned three years 
later. Respecting the details of the early education of Aristotle we are not informed. It is 
easily supposable that he early, and while Plato was yet living, came to entertain opinions 
deviating from those of his master, and that he also gave open expression to them. It ig 
possible that the anecdote is genuine which represents Plato as having said that Xenocrates 
needed the spur, but Aristotle the bridle. But it is improbable that Plato was himself 
the author of the comparison of Aristotle to a foal kicking at its mother; for Plato was 
not a partisan of the principle of authority, and was certainly not offended by opposition 
in argumentation. Plato is said to have called the house of Aristotle the reader’s house, 
and Aristotle himself, on account of his ready wit, the soul of the school. It is probable 
that Aristotle did not set up a school of his own during the life-time of Plato. If he had 
done so, it is unlikely that he would have immediately afterward given it up. At that 
time he gave instruction, however, in rhetoric in opposition to Isocrates, and is reported 
to have said, in parody of a verse of Philoctetus: “It is disgraceful to be silent, and 
allow Isocrates to speak” (αἰσχρὸν σιωπᾷν, ᾿Ισοκράτη δ᾽ ἐᾷν λέγειν, Cic., De Orat., 111. 35 
et al. ; Quinct., III. 1. 14). The stories of an offensive bearing of Aristotle toward Plato 
are refuted by the friendly relation which continued, after Plato’s death, to subsist be- 
tween Aristotle and Xenocrates, Plato’s devoted disciple, when they went in company to 
Atarneus, at the invitation of Hermias. Some verses of an elegy by Aristotle on the 
early death of his friend EKudemus are also preserved (ap. Olympiodor. in Plat. Gorg., 
166), in which he calls Plato a man whom the bad might not even praise (ἀνδρός͵ ὅν οὐδ᾽ 
αἰνεῖν τοῖσι κακοῖσι θέμις), and who first showed by word and deed, how a man may be at 
once good and happy (ὡς ἀγαθός τε καὶ εὐδαίμων ἅμα γίνεται ἀνήρ)β. After the unhappy 
end of Hermias, as a Persian captive, Aristotle married Pythias, the niece (or adopted 
daughter) of Hermias. He was subsequently married to Herpyllis. 

As the tutor of a prince, Aristotle was more fortunate than Plato; it must be confessed, 
however, that in this capacity he also labored under more favorable circumstances than 
Plato. Without losing himself in the pursuit of impracticable ideals, Aristotle seems to 
have fostered the high spirit of his ward. Alexander always retained sentiments of re- 
spect and love for his teacher, although in his last years a certain coldness existed between 
the two (Plut., Alex., ch. 8). 

Aristotle returned to Athens not long before the entrance of Alexander upon his 
Asiatic campaign (in the second half of Olymp. 111.2, or the spring of 334), perhaps in the 
year 335 B. c. He taught in a gymnasium called the Lyceum (consecrated to Apollo 
Avxetoc), in whose avenues of shade-trees (περίπατοι, whence the name Peripatetics) he 
walked, while communing with his more intimate disciples upon philosophical problems ; 
for more promiscuous audiences he lectured sitting (Diog. L., V. 3). It is possible that 
he also again gave rhetorical instruction, as in the period of his first residence at Athens. 
Gellius says (N. A., XX. 5): ἐξωτερικά dicebantur, quae ad rhetoricas meditationes faculta- 
temque argutiarum civiliumque rerum notitiam conducebant; ἀκροατικά autem vocabantur, in 
quibus philosophia remotior subtiliorque agitabatur. For his investigations in natural science 
facilities are said to have been tendered him by Philip and, more especially, by Alexander 


THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 139 


(Aelian., Var. Hist., IV. 19; Athen., IX. 398e; Plin., Hist. Nat., VIII. 16, 44). The accu- 
sation brought against Aristotle was founded on the impiety (ασέβεια) which his enemies 
pretended to discover in his hymn in eulogy of Hermias; it was designated by them as a 
Pan, and its author was charged with having deified a man. But in fact this hymn 
(which is preseryed in Diog. L., V. 7) is a hymn to virtue, and Hermias, who had suf- 
fered a death full of torments at the hands of the Persians, was only lauded in it as a 
martyr to virtue. Quitting Athens (late in the summer of 323), Aristotle is related to 
have said, alluding to the fate of Socrates, that he would not give the Athenians the 
opportunity of sinning a second time against philosophy. His death was not caused (as 
some report) by a self-administered poison nor by his throwing himself into the Euripus 
(for which no cause existed), but by disease (Diog. L., V. 10, following Apollodorus ; the 
disease appears to have been located principally in the stomach, according to Censorinus, 
De Die Nat., 14, 16). His death (according to Gell., N. A., XVII. 21, 35) occurred shortly 
before that of Demosthenes, hence late in the summer of 322 B. Ὁ. 

Goethe (Werke, Vol. 53, p. 85) characterizes Aristotle, in contrast with Plato (ef. above, 
§ 39), in these words: “ Aristotle stands to the world in the relation pre-eminently of a great 
architect. Here he is, and here he must work and create. He informs himself about the 
surface of the earth, but only so far as is necessary to find a foundation for his structure, 
aad from the surface to the center all besides is to him indifferent. He draws an immense 
circle for the base of his building, collects materials from all sides, arranges them, piles 
them up in layers, and so rises in regular form, like a pyramid, toward the sky, while 
Plato seeks the heavens like an obelisk or, better, like a pointed flame.” This charac- 
terization of Aristotle is, indeed, not so happy as that of Plato, cited above. The empirical 
basis, the orderly rise, the sober, clear insight of the reason, and the healthy, practical 
instinct, are traits rightly expressed; but when Goethe seems to assume that knowledge 
was of interest to Aristotle only so far as it was of practical significance, he runs counter 
to the doctrine and practice of this philosopher. Further, the methods both of Plato and 
of Aristotle include, together with the process of ascending to the universal, the reverse 
process of descending by division and deduction to the particular. 


§ 46. The writings of Aristotle were composed partly in popular, 
partly in acroamatic form; the latter in great part, and a very few 
fragments of the former, are all that have come down to us. Aris- 
totle wrote most of the works of the latter class during his last resi- 
dence in Athens. In point of subject-matter they are divided into 
logical, ethical, physical, and metaphysical works. His logical works 
have received the general title of Organon. The doctrine embodied 
in his metaphysical writings was called by Aristotle Yirst Philosophy 
(2. é., the philosophy of first or ultimate principles). Of those works 
which relate to physics or natural science, the Physics (Ausculta- 
tiones Physicae), and also the Natural History of Animals (a com- 
parative Physiology), are of especial philosophical importance. Still 
more important are his psychological works (three books on the Soul 
and several minor treatises). Among his ethical works the funda- 
mental one is his A¢izcs, which treats of the duties of the individual, 


140 THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 


and which exists in a threefold form: MWicomachean Ethics (Aris. 
totle’s work), Hudemean Ethics (written by Eudemus), and Magna 
Moralia (consisting of extracts from the two first). The Politica is 
a theory of the state on the basis of the Hthics. The Jhetoric and 
Poetic join on partly to the logical, and still more closely to the 
ethical works. 


The works of Aristotle were first printed in a Latin translation, together with the Commentaries of the 
Arabian philosopher, Averroés (about 1180), at Venice, 1489, and afterward, ibid. 1496, 1507, 1538, 1550-52, 
Basel, 1588, and often afterward; in Greek, first, Venetiis apud Aldwm Manutium, 1495-98 ; again, under 
the supervision of Erasmus and Simon Grynaeus, Basel, 1531, 1539, and 1550 (this third Basel edition is 
termed the Jsengriniana, from Isengrin, one of its editors); other editions were edited by Joh. Bapt. 
Camotius, Venetiis apud Aldi jilios, 1551-58; Friedrich Sylburg, Francf. 1584-87; Isaac Casaubonus, 
Greek and Latin, Lyons, 1590, etc. (1596, 1597, 1605, 1646); Du Val, Greek and Latin, Paris, 1619, etc. (1629, 
1639, 1654); the last complete edition in the 17th century appeared (in Latin) at Rome, 1668. Single 
works, in particular the Wicom. Ethics, were very frequently edited till toward the middle of the seven- 
teenth century; after this epoch editions of single works appeared but rarely, and no more complete edi- 
tions were published till near the end of the eighteenth century, when an edition of the works of Aristotle 
in Greek and Latin was commenced by Buhle, Biponti et Argentorati, 1791-1800, This edition was never 
completed. The first volume contains several essays, which are still of value, particularly as relating to 
the various editions of Aristotle and to his Greek and Latin commentators. Until the rise of Cartesianism 
and other modern philosophies, the doctrine of Aristotle, more or less freely interpreted, it is true, in indi- 
vidual points, was received as the true philosophy. Logic, ethics, ete., were learned from his writings at 
Catholic universities throughout the second half of the Middle Ages, and at Protestant universities, almost 
in the same sense in which geometry was learned from the elements of Euclid. Afterward, Aristotelianism 
came to be widely considered as a false doctrine, and (after sustaining attacks of constantly increasing 
frequency and virulence, beginning from the close of the Middle Ages) became even more and more univer- 
sally neglected, except where, as at the schools of the Jesuits, tradition retained unconditional anthority. 
Thus the existing editions were quite suflicient to meet the diminished interest felt in their contents. 
Leibnitz endeavored especially to appreciate justly the measure of philosophical truth contained in the 
doctrines of Aristotle, disapproving equally the two extremes of unconditional submission to their 
authority, and of absolute rejection. But he made of his own monadic doctrine and of his religious conyic- 
tions too immediate a standard of judgment. (See, among others, the monograph of Dan. Jacoby, De 
Leibnitii studiis Aristotelicis, inest ineditum Leibnitii, Diss. Inaug., Berlin, 1867.) In the last decades 
of the eighteenth century the historic instinct became more and more awakened, and to this fact the works 
of Aristotle owed the new appreciation of their great value as documents exponential of the historical de- 
velopment of philosophy. Thus the interest in the works of Aristotle was renewed, and this interest has 
gone on constantly increasing during the nineteenth century up to the present day. The most important 
complete edition of the present century is that prepared under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences at 
Berlin, Vols. I. and 11.. Aristoteles Graece ex rec. Imm. Bekkeri, Berlin, 1831; Vol. I1L, Aristoteles 
Latine interpretibus variis, ibid. 1831; Vol. 1V., Scholia in Aristotelem collegit Christ. Aug. Brandis, 
ibid, 1836; Bekker’s text was reprinted at Oxford in 1837, and Bekker has himself published the principal 
works of Aristotle separately, followed, with few exceptions, the text of the complete edition, but, unfor- 
tunately, without annexing the Varietas lect. contained in the latter. Didot has published at Paris 
an edition, edited by Dibner, Bussemaker, and Heitz (1848-69), which is valusble. Stereotyped editions 
were published by Tauchnitz, at Leipsic, in 1831-82 and 1843. German translations of most of Aristotle’s 
works are contained in Metzler’s collection (translated by K. L. Roth, K. Zell, L. Spengel, Chr. Walz, F. A. 
Krenz, Ph. H. Kiilb, J. Rieckher, and C. F. Schnitzer), in Hoffmann’s Library of Translations (translated 
by A. Karsch, Ad. Stahr, and Karl Stahr), and in Engelmann’s collection (Greek and German together). Of 
the editions of separate works the following may be mentioned :— 

Arist. Organon, ed. Th. Waitz,2 vols., Leipsic, 1844-46. Arist. Categor. gr. cwm versione Arabica 
Tsaaci Honeini fil., ed. Jul. Theod. Zenker, Leipsic, 1846. Soph. Elewchi, ed. Edw. Poste, London, 1866, 

Arist. Eth. Nicom., ed. C. Zell, 2 vols., Heidelberg, 1820; ed. A. Coray, Paris, 1822; ed. Cardwell, Oxford, 
1828-30; ed. C. L. Michelet, Berlin, 1829-35, 2d edition, 1848; further, separate editions of the text of 
Bekker, 1831, 1845, 1861; the edition of W. E. Jelf, Oxford and London, 1856, reproducing for the most part 
Bekker’s text; the edition of Rogers, edit. altera, London, 1865, and The Zthics of Aristotle illustrated 
with Essays and Notes, by Sir Alex. Grant, London, 1856-68, 2d edition, 1866. Books VIII. and IX. (On 


THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 141 


Friendship), published separately, Giessen, 1847, edited by Ad. Theod. Herm. Fritsche, who also published 
an edition of the Hud.. Eth., Regensburg, 1859. 

Polit., ed. Herm, Conring, Helmst. 1656, Brunswick, 1730, ed. J. G. Schneider, Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 
1809; C. Gottling, Jena, 1824; Ad. Stahr, Leipsic, 1839; B. St. Hilaire, Paris, 1837, 2d ed. 1848; I. Bekker, 
Berlin (1831), 1855; Eaton, Oxford, 1855; R. Congreve, London, 1855 and 1862; Mhet., ed. Spengel, 
Leipsic, 1867. 

Poet., ed. G. Hermann, Leipsic, 1802; Franz Ritter, Cologne, 1839; E. Egger (in his Essai sur 
Chistoire de la critique chez les Grecs, Paris, 1849); ΡΒ. St. Hilaire, Paris, 1858; I. Bekker (Ar. Phet. et 
Poét. ab I. B. tertium ed., Berlin, 1859); Franz Susemihl (Poét., in Greek and German, Leipsic, 1865) ; 
Joh. Vahlen, Berlin, 1867; F. Ueberweg (with translation and commentary), Berlin, 1869. 

The Physics of Aristotle has been published, Greek and German together, with explanatory notes, by C. 
Prantl, Leipsic, 1854; also the works De Coelo and De Generatione et Corrwptione have been edited by the 
same, Leipsic, 1857. Arist. iber die Farben, erl. durch eine Uebersicht iiber die Farbenlehre der Alten, 
von Carl Prantl, Munich, 1849. Meteorolog., ed. Jul. Lud. Ideler, Leipsic, 1834-36. B. St. Hilaire has edited 
and published, in Greek and French, and with explanatory notes, the Physica of Arist., Paris, 1862; the 
Meteorolog., Paris, 1867; the De Coelo, Paris, 1866; De Gen. et Corr., together with the work De Melisso, 
Xenophane, Gorgia (with an Introd. sur les origines de la philos. grecque), Paris, 1866. De Animal. 
Histor., ed. J. G. Schneider, Leipsic, 1811. Vier Biicher tiber die Theile der Thiere, Greek and German, 
with explanatory notes, by A. v. Frantzius, Leipsic, 1853; ed. Bern. Langkavel, Leipsic, 1868. Ueber die 
Zeugung und Entwickelung der Thiere, Greek and German, by Aubert and Wimmer, Leipsic, 1860; 
Thierkunde, Greek and German, by the same, ibid. 1868. 

Arist. De Anima libri tres, ed. F. Ad. Trendelenburg, Jena, 1833; ed. Barth. St. Hilaire, Paris, 1846; 
ed. A. Torstrik, Berlin, 1862 (cf. R. Noetel’s review in the Z. 7. G. W., XVIIL, Berlin, 1564, pp. 131-144). 

Arist. Metaph., ed. Brandis, Berlin, 1823; ed. Schwegler, Tiib. 1847-48; ed. H. Bonitz, Bonn, 1848-49. 

Many valuable contributions to the exegesis of Aristotle’s works are contained in those ancient com. 
mentaries and paraphrases which have come down to us, especially in those of Alexander of Aphrodisias, 
the exegete (see below, §51) of Dexippus and Themistius (see below, § 69), and of Syrianus, Ammonius 
Hermiae filius, Simplicius, and Philoponus (see below, § 70); also in the writings of Boéthius (ébid.) and 
others. Scholia to Aristotle nave been published by Brandis, Berlin, 1836 (in Bekker’s edition of the text), 
to the Metaphysics, by Brandis, ibid. 1837, to the De Anima (extracts from an anonymous commentary 
on Aristotle’s De Anima), by Spengel, Munich, 1847, and a paraphrase of the Soph. Elench., by Spengel, 
ibid. 1842. An old Hebrew translation of the Commentary of Averroes on the Rhetoric was published 
by J. Goldenthal, at Leipsic, in 1842. 

Of modern writers on the works of Aristotle, we name the following: J. G. Buhle, Commentatio de 
librorum Aristotelis distributione in exotericos et acroamaticos, Gott. 1788 (contained also in the first 
vol. of Buhle’s edition of Aristotle, Biponti, 1791, pp. 105-152), and Ueber die Echtheit der Metaph. des 
Aristoteles, in the Bibl. f. alie Litt. u. Kunst, No. 4, Gott. 1788, pp. 142; Ueber die Ordnung und Folge 
der Aristot. Schriften tiberhaupt, ibid. No. 10, 1794, 83-47. 

Am, Jourdain, Recherches critiques sur lage et Vorigine des traductions latines α' Aristote et sur les 
commentaires grecs ou arabes employés par les docteurs scholastiques, Paris, 1819, 2d ed. 1843. 

France. Nicol. Titze, De Aristotelis operwm serie et distinctione, Leipsic, 1826. 

Ch. A. Brandis, Veber die Schicksale der Aristotelischen Biicher und einige Kriterien ihrer Echtheit, 
in the Rhein. Mus., I. 1827, pp. 236-254, 259-286 (cf. Kopp, Nachtrag zu Br. Unters. tiber die Schicksale 
der Ariat. Biicher, ibid. 111. 1, 1829); Ueber die Reihenfolge der Biicher dea Arist. Organons und ihre 
griech. Ausleger, in the Abh. der Berl. Akad. der Wiss., 1833; Ueber die Arist. Metaphysik, ibid. 1834; 
Ueber Aristoteles’ Rhetorik und die griech. Ausleger derselben, in the Philologus, IV., 1849, p. 1 seq. 

Ad. Stahr, Avistotelia, Vol. II.: Die Schicksale der Arist. Schriften, ete., Leipsic, 1832; Aristoteles 
bei den Romern, ibid. 1834. 

Leonb. Spengel (On Aristotle's Poetic; On the 7th Book of the Physics; On the mutual relation of 
the three works on Ethics attributed to Aristotle; On the Politics of Aristotle; On the order of Aristotle’s 
works in natural science; On the Rhetoric of Aristotle), in the δῆ. der bair. Akad. der Wiss., 1837, 
1841, '43, °47, 48, °51; Ueber κάθαρσις τῶν παθημάτων bei Arist., ibid. Vol. IX. Munich, 1859; Aristot. 
Studien: Nik. Ethik ; Eudem. Ethik; grosse Ethik; Politik; Poétik, in Vols. X. and XI. of the Trans. 
of the Bayar. Acad. of Sciences, Munich. 1863-66 (cf. Bonitz, in the Zeitschr. f. dstr.-Gymn. 1866, pp. 
T7T-804). ; 

Jacob Bernays, Ergdnzung zu Aristoteles' Poétik, in the Rhein. Mus. fiir Ph., new series, VIII., 1853, 
pp. 561-596; Grundziige der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles tiber Wirkung der Tragddie, in the 
᾿Αδῆ. der hist. philos. Ges 2u Breslau, Breslau, 1858; Die Dialoge des Arist. in ihrem Verhiltniss cu 
seinen tibrigen Werken, Berlin, 1863. Cf. P. W. Forchhammer, Aristoteles und die exoterischen Reden, 
Kiel, 1864. 


149 THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 


Herm. Bonitz, Arist. Studien, I.-V., Vienna, 1862-1867. 

Valentin Rose, De Arist. ibrorum ordine et auctoritate, Berlin, 1854; Avristoteles pseudepigraphus 
(a collection of the fragments of the lost works, almost all of which are regarded by Rose as spurious), 
Leipsic, 1863. 

Emil Heitz, Die verlorenen Schriften des Aristoteles, Leipsic, 1865. 

Rud. Eucken, Ve Arist. dicendi ratione, pars I.: Observationes de particularum usu, Gott. 1866 
(‘“ observations,” which may be useful as assisting to determine the authorship of particular works and 
books, as 6. g., the “observation” that the combination κἂν εἰ, where ἂν remains without influence upon 
the construction, is employed by Aristotle and Eudemus in cases where Theophrastus would use καὶ εἰ δή 
τις, and that Eudemus approaches, in general, much more nearly than Theophrastus to Aristotle in mode 
of expression, etc. ; but ef. the review of Eucken’s dissertation by Bonitz in the Zeitschrift fiir osterr. 
Gymn., 1866, pp. 804-812); Ueber den Sprachgebrauch des Aristoteles, Berlin, 1869; Beitrdge z. Verst. 
des Arist. in the Neue Jahrb. f. Philol. u. Pad. Vol. 99, 1869, pp. 248-252 and 817-820. 

Of the Logie and logical writings of Aristotle write: Philipp Gumposch, Leipsic, 1889, F. Th. Waitz, 
De Ar. libri π. ἑρμηνείας cap. decimo, Marb. 1844, Ad. Textor, De Herm. Ar. (Inaugural Diss.), Berlin, 
1870 (ef. § 47, below), 

Of the Metaphysics: C. L. Michelet, Hramen critique de Touvrage @ Aristote intitulé Métaphysique, 
ouer. cour. par Vacad. des 86. mor. et pol., Paris, 1836; Felix Ravaisson, Essai sur la Métaphysique 
@ Aristote, Paris, 1837-46; Brummerstidt, Ueber Inhalt und Zusammenhang der metaph. Biicher des 
Arist., Rostock, 1841; J. C. Glaser, Die Metaph. des Arist. nach Composition, Inhalt und Methode, 
Berlin, 1841; Herm. Bonitz, Observ. Criticae in Arist. libros metaphysicos, Berlin, 1842; Wilh. Christ, 
Studia in Arist. libros metaph. collata, Berlin, 1853. Cf. Krische, Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der 
alien Philosophie J, 1840, pp. 263-276; and Bonitz and Schwegler, in their commentaries on the JDfet. of 
Aristotle (cf. below, § 48). 

Of Aristotle’s physical works: C. Prantl, De Ar. librorum ad hist. animal. pert. ordine atque dispo- 
sitione, Munich, 1843; Symbolae criticae in Arist. phys. auscultationes, Berlin, 1843; H. Thiel, De Zool. 
Ar. l. ordine ac distrib. (G.-Pr.), Breslau, 1855; Sonnenburg, Zu Ar. Thiergeschichte (G.-Pr.), Bonn, 
1857; Ch. Thurot, Obs. crit. on Ar. De Part, Animalium, in the Revue arch., 1867, pp. 233-242; on the 
Meteorol., ibid. 1869, pp. 415-420. Cf. various works by Barthélemy St. Hilaire, Jessen, and others (see 
§ 49, below). 

Of the Ethics and Politics: Wilh. Gottlieb Tennemann, Bem. tiber die sogen. grosse EHthik des 
Arist., Erfurt, 1798; F. Schleiermacher, Ueber die griech. Scholien zur Nikomuchischen Ethik des Arist. 
(read on May 16, 1816), in 8.°s Sammtliche Werke, 111. 2, 1833, pp. 809-826; Ueber die ethischen Werke 
des Aristoteles (read December 4, 1817), ibid. 111. 8, 1835, 306-333; W. Van Swinderen, De Ar. Pol. libris, 
Groningen, 1824; Herm. Bonitz, Obs, Crit. in Arist. quae feruntur Magna Moralia et Eth. Hudemia, 
Berlin, 1844; A. M. Fischer, De Ethicis Nicom. et Hudem., Bonn, 1847; Ad. Trendelenburg, Ueber Stellen 
in der Nik.-Ethik, in the Monatsber. der Berliner Acad. d. Wiss., 1850, and in Trendelenburg’s L/ist. Beitr. 
zur Philos., 11.. Berlin, 1855; Zur Arist. Ethik, in Hist. Beitr., 111., Berlin, 1867; Joh. Petr. Nickes, De 
Arist. Politicorwm libris (diss. inaug.), Bonn, 1851; J. Bendixen, Comm. de Ethicorwn Nicomacheorum 
integritate, Ploena, 1854; Bemerkungen zum 7. Buch der Nikom. Ethik, in the Philol., X. 1855, pp. 
199-210, 263-292; Uebersicht tiber die neueste die Aristotelische Ethik und Politik betrefende Litt. ibid. 
XI. 1856, pp. 351-3878, 544-582, XIV. 1859, 332-872, XVI. 1860, 465-522; cf. XIIT. 1858, pp. 264-301; 
H. Hampke, Ueber das fiinfte Buch der Nik. Eth., ibid. XVI. pp. 60-84; G. Teichmiiler, Zur Frage tiber 
die Reihenfolge der Biicher in der Arist. Politik, ibid. pp. 164-166; Christian Pansch, De Ethicis Nicom. 
genuino Arist. libro diss., Bonn, 1833 (ef. Trendelenburg’s review of this work, and, in particular, his de- 
fense against Pansch of the genuineness of the 10th Book of the Nicom. Ethics, in the Jahrb. fiir wiss. 
Kritik, 1834, p. 358 seq., and Spengel, in the Add. der bair. Akad., 111. p. 518 seq.); Chr. Pansch, De Ar. 
Eth, Nic., VU. 12-15 and X. 1-5 (@.-Pr.), Eutin, 1858; H. 8. Anton, Quae intercedat ratio inter Eth. Nic. 
VII. 12-15 et X. 1-5, Dantziec, 1858; F. Miinscher, Quaest. crit. et eweget. in Arist. ΕἾ], Nicom., Marburg, 
1861; R. Noetel, Quaest. Ar. (de libro V. Eth. Nic.), (G.-Pr.), Berlin, 1862; F. Hacker, Das V. Buch der Nik. 
Ethik., in the Zeitschr. 7. ἃ. G.-W., XVI. pp. 5138-560; Beitr. ες. Kritik u. Lrkl. des VII. Buches der Nik. 
Ethik, in the Zeitschr. f. d. G.- W., Berlin, 1869 (cf. 1863); H. Rassow, Observationes criticae in Aristote- 
lem, Berlin, 1858; Hmendationes Aristoteleae, Weimar, 1861; Beitrage zur Erkldrung und Teaxtkritik 
der Nik. Ethik des Arist., Weimar, 1862 and 1868; Bemerkungen tiber einige Stellen der Politik des 
Aristoteles, Weimar, 1864; Joh. Imelmann, Obs. er. in Ar. E. N. (Diss.), Halle, 1864: Moritz Vermehren, 
Aristotelische Schriftstellen, Heft I.: eur Nikom. Ethik, Leipsic, 1864; W. Oncken, Die Wiederbelebung 
der Arist. Politik in der abendldndischen Lesewelt, in the Festschrift zur Begriissung der 24, Vers, 
deutscher Philol. u. Schulm. zu Heidelberg, Leipsic, 1865, pp. 1-18; Die Staatslehre des Arist., Leipsic, 
1870; Susemihl, Zwm ersten. eweiten und vierten Buche der Politik, in the Jahrb. f. Ph. u. Pdd., Vol. 
XCIII. pp. 821-958, Rhein. Mus.,N.8., XX. 1865, pp. 504-517; X XI. 1866, pp. 551-573; and Zum 3, 7. uw. 8, 


THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 143 


Buche, in the Philologus, XXV. pp. 385-415; KXIX. pp. 97-119; De Arist. Politicorum libris J. 
et 11, Greifswald, 1867; Appendia, ibid. 1869; d. τι. Lit. z. Ar. Pol., Jahrd. f. Ph., XCUX. pp. 598-610, and 
CI. (1870), pp. 348-350; Ewald Bicker, De quibusdam Pol. Ar. locis (Inaug. Diss.), Greifsw. 1567 (cf. 
below, § 50). 

To the Poetic and Rhetoric of Aristotle relate (beside the works already cited of Spengel, Bernays, 
and others) the following: Max Schmidt, De tempore quo ab Arist. l. de arte rhet. conscr. et ed. sint, 
Halle, 1887; Franz Susemihl, Studien zur Aristotel. Poetik, in the Rh. Mus., XVIIL. p. 366 seq., 471 seq., 
XIX. p. 197 seq., XXII. p. 217 seq.; cf. Jahn’s Jahrb., 89, Ὁ. 504 seq., and 95, pp. 159-184 and 221-286; 
Joh. Vahlen, Zur Kritik Arist. Schriften (Poetic and Rhetoric), Vienna, 1861, in the Sitzungsberichte of 
the Vienna Acad. of Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 59-148; also, Arist. Lehre von der Rangfolge der Theile 
der Tragédie, in the “ Gratulationschrift,’ entitled Symbola philologorum Bonnensium in honorem 
Frid. Ritschelii collecta, Leipsic, 1864, pp. 155-184; Beitrdge zur Arist. Poétik, Vienna, 1865-1567 
(from the “Sitzungsberichte” of the Academy); Gust. Teichmiller. Arist, Forschungen, 10: Beitrage 
zur Erklirung der Poétik des Arist. (Halle, 1867), I1.: Arist. Philos, der Kunst (ibid. 1869), (cf. 
below, § 50). 


Aristotle probably composed a number of works in dialogue during his first residence at 
Athens and in the life-time of Plato. Of this class was the dialogue Hudemus, some frag- 
ments of which are preserved (ap. Plutarch, Dio, 22; Consol. ad Apol., ch. 27; Cic., De 
Div., 1. 25, 53, ete.; cf. J. Bernays, in the Rhein. Mus. 7. Phil., new series, XVI. 1861, pp. 
236-246). Kudemus was a member of the Platonic circle, a friend of Aristotle, and a 
participant in the campaign of Dio against Dionysius in Sicily, where he fell, 353 Β. 6. To 
his memory Aristotle dedicated the dialogue named after him, a work in imitation of 
Plato’s Phaedo ; in it Aristotle presented arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul. 
The first twenty-seven volumes in the catalogue of the works of Aristotle, as given by 
Diog. Laért., V. 22-27 (cf. Anonym. Menag., 61 seq.) are writings in dialogue. They are: 
On Justice, On Poets, On Philosophy, Politicus, Gryllus, Nerinthus, Sophist, Menexenus, 
Eroticus, Symposion, On Riches, Protrepticus, ete. By subsequent writers these works 
were termed exoteric, and in distinction from them the more strictly scientific ones were 
termed esoteric. In Aristotle’s works the word esoteric does not occur (yet ef. Analyt. Post., 
1. 10, p. 76 b, 27, ὁ ἔσω λόγος as ὁ ἐν TH ψυχῇ, in opposition to ἔξω λόγος); but exoteric is 
employed in the sense of ‘‘ outwardly directed, addressed to the respondent (πρὸς étepor),” 
arguing from what appears to him to be true, in contrast to that which interests the 
thinker who looks only at the essential (τῷ φιλοσόφῳ καὶ ζητοῦντι καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸν μέλει" see 
Top., VIII. 1, 151 b, 9; Anal. Post. I. 10, 76 b, 24; Pol., VII. 3, 1325 Ὁ, 29, and compare 
Thurot, in Jahn’s Jahrb., 81, 1860, p. 749 seq., and in his Etudes sur Aristote, Paris, 1860, 
p- 214 seq.; cf. also G. Thomas, De Ar. ἐξ 2. deque Ciceronis Aristotelio more, Gott. 1860, and 
Stahr, in his Avist., II. pp. 235-279); sometimes Aristotle (as Jak. Bernays has shown, Dia- 
loge des Arist., Berlin, 1863, pp. 29-93) applies the epithet in question to his dialogical writ- 
ings; yet he also employs it (Phys., IV. 10, 217 b, 19) in reference to those explanatory 
parts of his strictly scientific works, with which, in conformity to his dialectical method, he 
usually prefaces the parts devoted to rigid demonstration (ἀπόδειξις), or to those parts which 
are rather “ dialectical,” ¢. e., controversial, than ‘‘ apodictical,” or purely scientific (Pol, I. 5, 
p. 1254, 33). The general signification of the word is in both cases the same, the applica- 
tion only being different. Dialogues are also termed by Aristotle ἐν Kow'@ γιγνόμενοι λόγοι 
(“arguments carried on in common,” ὦ. e., by means of disputation with a respondent, 
whether in real διαλεκτικαῖς συνόδοις, Top., VIII. 5, or in dialogical writings), or éxde- 
δομένοι λόγοι, 7. €., λόγοι given to the public, in distinction from unpublished speculations, 
instituted primarily by the philosopher for his own benefit, and then communicated, 
whether orally or in writing, to the (private) circle of pupils associated with him in 
strictly scientific speculation. Rigidly philosophical speculations are termed by Aristotle, 
in Pol., 111. 12, p. 1282 b, 19 et al. (cf. Hud. Eth., I. 8, 1217 Ὁ, 23), of κατὰ φιλοσοφίαν λόγοι, 


144 THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 


and closely related to this is the expression διδασκαλικοί λογόι, defined in De Soph. Elenchis, 
c. 2, p. 165 Ὁ, as οἱ ἐκ τῶν οἰκείων ἀρχῶν ἑκάστου μαϑήματος καὶ οὐκ ἐκ τῶν τοῦ ἀποκριίνο- 
μένου δοξῶν συλλογιζόμενοι (which latter λόγοι, although as πειραστικοί they must be classed 
as exoteric, do nevertheless not wander from the precise matter in hand, like the ἔξωθεν 
λόγοι, Pol., II. 6, 1264 Ὁ, 39; cf. Hth. Hud., VII. 1, 1235 a, 4 and 5, 1239 Ὁ, or the λέγειν ἔξω 
τοῦ πράγματος, Rhet., I. 1, 1354 Ὁ, 27, 1353 a, 2). The ἐξωτερικά are defined by Simplicius 
(in Phys., 386 Ὁ, 25) as τά κοινὰ καὶ dv ἐνδόξων περαινόμενα, by Philoponus, as λόγοι μὴ 
ἀποδεικτικοὶ μηδὲ πρὸς τοὺς γνησίους τῶν ἀκροατῶν εἰρημένοι, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τοὺς πολλοὺς ἐκ πιθα- 
νῶν ὡρμημένοι. In view of the fact that Aristotle here and there in his strictly scientific 
writings addresses himself to the ‘“ hearers,” and that at least many of these writings stand 
in the closest relation to his oral lectures (ἀκροᾶσεις, which were intended to be read publicly 
or were taken down from his extemporaneous lectures), they were called by later genera- 
tions acroamatic or (metaphorically) ἀκροάσεις. Philosophical occupation with a specific 
group of objects was called a πραγματεία, and heace the rigidly philosophical writings, 
directed strictly and alone to the object of inquiry, leaving out all dialogical ornamentation, 
were termed by the successors of Aristotle ‘‘ pragmatic.” His works of this sort appear, 
either wholly or for the most part, not to have been made public by Aristotle himself, so 
long as he was engaged in lecturing on the subjects of which they treat, but to have 
been first published by his scholars—a part of them by Andronicus of Rhodes. 

As secondary works and forerunners of his strictly scientific writings we must regard 
the ὑπομνήματα, or the résumés drawn up by Aristotle for his personal use, and some of 
which attained to publicity. Among the lost works of this kind belong abstracts of the 
writings of Archytas, of the Platonic Republic, of the Leges, the Tim., etc., mentioned by 
Diog. L. in his list of Aristotle’s works. The work De Melisso, de Xenophane (or de Zenone), 
de Gorgia, which has come down to us, bears also the character of a ὑπόμνημα, but its 
authenticity is at least doubtful (see above, § 17). In the same class belong also the works 
De Bono and De Ideis, of which fragments are extant, collected and edited by Brandis (Bonn, 
1823); they are memoirs of Plato’s oral teachings, written down from memory with the aid, 
perhaps, of transcripts of Plato’s lectures made at or near the time of their delivery. Cf. 
the works of Brandis, Bournot, and others, cited above, § 41. 

Aristotle’s logical works are the κατηγορίαι (whose authenticity is not wholly certain, 
see Spengel, Miinchener Gel. Anz., 1845, No. 5, and Prantl, in the first volume of his Gesch. 
der Logik), on the fundamental forms of the mentally representable, and the corresponding 
fundamental forms of mental representations and words, or on the fundamental forms of 
‘affirmations concerning the existent;” περὶ ἑρμηνείας (De Interpretatione, whose genuine- 
ness is disputed by Andronicus of Rhodus, though, apparently, on insufficient grounds), on 
the Proposition and the Judgment; ἀναλυτικὰ πρότερα, on the Syllogism ; ἀναλυτικὰ ὕστερα, 
respecting Proof, Definition, Division, and the Cognition of Principles; the τοπεκά, on 
Dialectical or Examining Inferences, such as usually arise in disputations from provisional 
or probable premises (ἔνδοξα) ; and περὶ σοφιστικῶν ἐλέγχων, on the Fallacies of the Sophists 
in their refutations and on the exposure of the deceptive appearance in these fallacies. 
These works were termed by the Aristotelians ὀργανικά, 7. e., works treating of method, 
the “organon” of investigation. In the Zopica, VIII. 14, 163 b, 11, Aristotle remarks 
that it is an important aid (ὄργανον) to the attainment of scientific knowledge, to be able to 
draw the consequences which follow from: each one of two contradictory propositions, and 
in Met., IV. 3, 1005 Ὁ, 4, he adds that the study of the doctrine of the ὃν 7 ὃν (or of being 
as such, ὦ. 6. the study of ontology or metaphysics, πρώτη φιλοσοφία) must not be com- 
menced until one is already familiar with Analytics; these remarks of Aristotle indicate 
the origin and significance of the term ‘‘ Organon,” as above applied. 


THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 145 


To the works on πρώτη φιλοσοφία some arranger of the works of Aristotle (Andronicus 
of Rhodes, as there is scarcely any reason to doubt), on the ground of certain didactic 
utterances of Aristotle respecting the πρότερον πρὸς ἡμᾶς and the πρότερον φύσει, or the 
“prior for us” and the ‘prior by nature,” assigned a place after those on physics, and 
hence gave to them, as arranged in fourteen books, the general title, τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά 
(works coming after those relating to Physics), the books being numbered A, a, B, Τὶ etc., 
up toN = L, IL, IIL, IV., ete., to XIV.; in determining the order of the books, he seems 
to have been guided chiefly by the citations contained in them. The ‘“‘ Metaphysics” is 
made up of an extended, connected, but not completely finished exposition of doctrine 
(Book I.: Philosophical and historico-critical Introduction, and Books III.; 1V.; VI., VII., 
VILL. ; 1X.), and of several smaller and in part spurious treatises. Some ancient authorities 
attribute the authorship of Book II. (a) to Pasicles of Rhodes, a son of a brother of Eude- 
mus and an auditor of Aristotle. According to others, Book I. (A) was his composition (see 
Asclep., Schol in Arist. ed Br., Ὁ. 520 «, 6). Book V. (A) contains an inquiry περὶ τοῦ ποσαχῶς, 
respecting the various significations of philosophical terms, and is cited by this title in VI. 
4, VII. 1, and X.1. Book X. treats of the one and the many, the identical and the 
opposed, ete. Book XI. contains, in chaps. 1-8, p. 1065 a, 26, a shorter presentation of 
the substance of III., IV., and VI.; if genuine, it must be regarded as a preliminary 
sketch; if not, it is an abstract made by an early Aristotelian; chaps. 1 and 2 correspond 
with Book III. (ἀπορίαι, doubts, difficulties), 3-6 with IV. (the problem of metaphysics and 
the principle of contradiction), and 7 and 8, up to the place indicated, with VI. (introduc- 
tory remarks on the doctrine of substance); the rest of Book XI. is a compilation from the 
Physics, and hence decidedly spurious. The first five chapters of Book XII. contain a 
sketch of the doctrine of substance (more fully detailed in Books VII. and VIII.) and of 
the doctrine of potentiality and actuality (discussed more fully in Book IX.); chaps. 6-16 
are a somewhat more detailed, but still very compressed exposition of Aristotle’s theology. 
The last two books (XIII. and XIV.) contain a critique of the theory of ideas and of the 
number-doctrine, which in parts (XIII. 4 and 5) agrees verbally with portions of the first 
book (1. 6 and 9). An hypothesis has been suggested by Titze, and modified and expanded 
by Glaser and others, to the effect that Books I., IX. chs. 1-8, and XII., constituted origi- 
nally a shorter draught of the whole πρώτη φιλοσοφία, of which the first book was retained 
by Aristotle in his larger work, while the rest were altered and enlarged; but this theory 
ig very uncertain, and it is quite as possible that the whole of Book Καὶ (XI.) and at least the 
first part of Book A (XII.) are spurious. Jn the relation of Books I., XIII. and XIV., to 
each other and to the whole there is much that is puzzling; in particular, it would seem 
that Aristotle can not have intended the repetition of the critique of the theory of ideas. 
The parts of Book XIII. which agree with parts in the first book appear to have been 
written later than the latter, and not by Aristotle, but by some revising Aristotelian; the 
genuineness of Book XIII., as far as ch. 9, p. 1086 a, 21, is at least doubtful. The begin- 
ning of the Metaph. is said (by Albertus Magnus, see Jourdain, Recherches Critiques) to have 
been regarded by the Arabians as the work of Theophrastus. The natural termination of 
the Metaphysics is with the doctrine of God, or the theology of Aristotle (XII. 6-10). 

The series of works on natural science opens with the φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις in eight books 
(called also φυσικά or τὰ περὶ φύσεως, of which V., V1., and VIII. treat specially of motion, 
while VII. seems not to belong in this connection, and was probably not written by Aris- 
totle at all); to this should be joined rep? οὐρανοῦ. in four and rept γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς in 
two books; also the μετεωρολογικά (or περὶ μετεώρων) in four books. of which the fourth 
appears to be an independent treatise. The book περὶ κόσμου is spurious. The opuscule 
περὶ χρωμάτων was composed in the Peripatetic school. The original work on plants is 


10 


146 THE WORKS OF ARIS€OTLE. 


lost; the one which exists under that title in our editions is spurious—perhaps the work 
of Nicolaus of Damascus. The History of Animals (περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστορίαι, of which the tenth 
book is spurious), together with certain related works on the parts, generation, and 
locomotion of animals (the epi ζῴων κινήσεως is not genuine), is preserved, but the 
Anatomy of Animals (ἀνατομαῦ is lost. To the three books περὶ ψυχῆς join on the 
opuscules: περὶ αἰσϑήσεως καὶ αἰσϑητῶν, περὶ μνήμης Kai ἀναμνήσεως, περὶ ὕπνου Kal éypy- 
γόρσεως͵ περὶ ἐνυπνίων, περὶ μαντικῆς τῆς ἐν τοῖς ὕπνοις, περὶ μακροβιότητος καὶ βραχυβιότητος, 
περὶ ζωῆς καὶ ϑανάτου (with which the περὶ νεότητος καὶ γήρως of our editions must ap- 
parently be classed), The φυσιογνωμικά is spurious. The collection οἵ προβλήματα is ἃ 
conglomerate gradually brought together on the basis of Aristotle's notes (cf. Carl Prantl, 
Ueber die Probleme des Arist., in the Abh. der Akad. d. W., Munich, 1850). The περὶ 
θαυμασίων ἀκουσμάτων is spurious (cf. H. Schrader, Ueber die Quellen der pseudo-arist Schrift 
π. 6.a., in the Jahrb. f. Philol. u. Pid. Vol. 97, 1867, pp. 217-232); so, perhaps, is also 
the περὶ ἀτόμων γραμμῶν. 

Three works in our Corpus Aristoteleum treat of ethics in general: ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια in 
ten books, ἠθικὰ Evdjuera in seven books, and ἠθικὰ μεγάλα (perhaps corrupted from ἠθικῶν 
κεφάλαια or from ἠθικῶν μεγάλων κεφάλαια, according to Trendelenburg’s conjecture, Bett- 
riage zur Philos., Vol. IL., Berlin, 1855, p. 352 seq.). The three works on ethics correspond 
with each other in content as follows: Hth. Nic., I., 11., II. 1-7, Eth. Bud., 1., 11., Magn. 
Mor., 1. 1-19, contain general preparatory considerations; Hth. Nic., 111. 8-15 and IV., Eth. 
Eud., 111., Magn. Mor., 1. 20-23, treat of the different ethical virtues, with the exception of 
justice; Hth. Nic., V., with which Eth. Lud., IV., is identical, and dfagn. Mor., 1. 34, and 11., 
init., relate to justice and equity; th. Nic., VI., with which Hth. Hud., V., is identical, and 
Magn. Mor., 1. 35 (cf. 11. 2, 3), relate to the dianoétic virtues; Eth. Nic., VII., identical 
with Hth. Eud., VI., and Magn. Mor., 11. 4—7, to continence, incontinence, and pleasure; 
Eth. Nic., VIII, 1X., Hth. Hud., VII. 1-12 (or 13 init., where there is evidently a gap), and 
Magn. Mor., IJ. 11-17, treat of friendship; th. Hud., VII. 13 (where the text is full of gaps 
and alterations) treats of the power of wisdom (φρόνησις, practical wisdom); Magn. Mor., 11. 
10, of the signification of ὀρθὸς λόγος, and of the power of ethical knowledge; Hih. Hud., 
VII. 14, 15, and Magn. Mor., ΤΙ. 8, 9, of prosperity and καλοκἀγαθία (honor, the union 
of the beautiful and the good); Eth. Mic., X., of pleasure and happiness. That the 
so-called Magna Moralia, the shortest of these works, is not the oldest of them (as 
Schleiermacher believed), but that the Nicomachean Ethics (from which the citations 
in Pol., 11. 2, III. 9 and 12, IV. 41, VII. 1 and 13, are made) is the original work of 
Aristotle, while the Eudemian Ethics is a work of his pupil, Eudemus, based on the 
work of Aristotle, and that the Magna Moralia is an abstract from both, but principally 
from the Eudemian Ethics, hag been almost universally allowed since Spengel’s investi- 
gation of the subject (see above, p. 141); Barthélemy St. Hilaire, however (Morale 
d@ Aristote, Paris, 1856), sees in the Eudemian Ethics not so much an original work of 
Eudemus, as rather a mere redaction of a series of lectures on Ethics by Aristotle, exe- 
cuted by one of his auditors (probably by Eudemus, who, it is supposed, wrote them down 
for his own use, as they were delivered); he is inclined to assign to the Magn. Moral. also 
the same date and kind of origin. But there can hardly be a doubt that this latter work 
belongs to a later period, such are the marks of Stoic influences in thought and termi- 
nology which it contains (see Ramsauer, Zur Charakteristik der Magna Moralia {| G.-Pr.], 
Oldenburg, 1858, and Spengel, Arist. Studien, I., Munich, 1863, p. 17, and Trendelenburg, 
Einige Belege fiir die nacharist. Abfassungszeit der Magna Mor., in his Histor. Beitr., 111. p. 
433 seq.); the following citation contained in it (11. 6, 1201 b, 25): ὥσπερ ἔφαμεν. ἐν τοῖς 
ἀναλυτικοῖς͵ is ground for the conjecture, that the author published it under the name of 


THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 147 


Aristotle; still, other Analytica (paraphrases of the Aristotelian work) may be meant. Of 
the Ludemian Ethics, Spengel and Zeller, in particular, have shown that the author, though 
generally following Aristotle, has introduced original matter, which appears occasionally 
in the light of an intentional correction of Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics appears 
to have been published after the death of Aristotle by his son Nicomachus. To which 
work the books common to the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics (Nic., V.-VIL., Hud, 
IV.-VL) originally belonged, is a matter of dispute. It may be shown, as well on 
internal grounds as from references in the Politica, that the first of these books (Eth 
Nic., V.= Eth. Eudem., 1V.)* was originally a part of the Nicomachean Ethics.¢ The pres- 
ent Book VI. of the Nic. Eth. (= B. V. of the Hud.) agrees in many respects better with 
the books belonging to the Hud. than with those which belong to the Nic. Eth. (cf. Alb. 
Max. Fischer, De Eth. Nic. et Eud., diss. inaug., Bonn, 1847, and Fritzsche in his edition of 
the Hud. Ethics); yet at least a book of essentially similar content must have belonged 
originally to the Nic. Eth., to which book Aristotle refers in Metaph., 1.1, 981}, 25. But 
the last of these identical books (Eth. Nic. VII. = Eth. Eud., V1.) belongs very probably 
either wholly or at least in its last chapters (Eth. Nic., VII. 12-15, which, like B. X. of 
the Nic., though not altogether in the same sense, treats of pleasure) not to the Nico- 
machean Ethics, and is also not to be viewed as an earlier draught of Aristotle’s, but as a 
later revision, probably executed by Eudemus. The opuscule περὶ ἀρετῶν καὶ κακιῶν is 
probably spurious. The eight books of the πολιτικά join on to the Ethics. According to 
Barth. St. Hilaire and others the original order of the Books was 1., IL., IfI., VIL, VIII., 
ΤΥ. VL, V.: yet the theory that Book V. and VI., have been made to exchange places, is 
improbable; Hildenbrand, Zeller, and others, oppose, while Spengel, and, in a recent work, 
Oncken (Staatsl. des Arist., I. 98 seq.) defend it. That Books VII. and VIII. should follow 
immediately after III. is extremely probable, was long ago affirmed, among others, by 
Nicolas d’Oresme (died in 1382) and by Conring (who edited the Politics in 1656) to be 
the order intended by Aristotle. In B. I. Aristotle treats of the household, omitting, 
however, to give rules for the moral education and training of children, since these 
depend on the ends pursued by the state. In B. II. he criticises various philosophical 
ideals and existing forms of the state. In B. III. he discusses the conception of the 
state, and distinguishes, as the different possible forms of government, monarchy and 

* With the possible exception of chs. 11, 12, 15. 

+ In the second half the order has been considerably disturbed. The section, c. 10, p. 1184a, 23-1184a, 
15, must be misplaced; Hildenbrand conjectures that it belongs at the end of c. 8. This conjecture is 
opposed by the expression εἴρηται πρότερον, p. 1184 8, 24, which implies a greater separation from ο. 8, and 
by the general plan evidently adopted by Aristotle in the whole work, in accordance with which the special 
and particularly the political bearings of each topic are not considered until each topic has been treated of 
in general terms; according to this method the passage in question should not come before 6. 9, and perhaps 
not before c. 10. C.15 must follow immediately after c. 12, and hence Zeller would place this chapter, with 
the exception of the last sentence, between cc. 12 and 13; but since c. 13 in respect of subject-matter (not 
formally, indeed; perhaps some words have fallen away from the beginning) joins on to ec. 10 (Spengel 
asserts this conjecturally ; Hermann Adolph Fechner, Hampke, and others are more positive), the correct 
order is rather to be restored by placing ce. 11 and 12 after 13 and 14. As the correct order, therefore, we 
would propose the following: cc. 8, 9, 10, excepting the section above indicated, 13, 14, then that section 
from ο. 10, and finally 11, 12,15. The defective arrangement may have arisen from the misplacement of a 
few leaves in an origina] codex. Originally, a leaf numbered, ¢. g., a, contained say c. 8 post med. to c. 10, 
p. 1184 a, 28, leaf a +, c. 10, 118 4. 15 toc. 10, fin., p. 1186.a, 9, leaf a + 1]. ¢. 13 and 14, p. 1187 a, 4 to 
1138 a, 8, leaf a + 711. the passage now standing in ο. 10, p. 1184 5, 23 to 1185 a, 15, leaf a + 177] cc. 11 and 
12, p. 1136 a, 10 to 1187 a, 4, and, finally, leaf a + V., the conclusion of the whole book, c, 15, p. 1188 a, 4 to 
1188b, 14. The leaves then fell into the false order: a,a + JJ/J.,.a+J,a+IV..a+JI,a+ V. The 
author of the Magna Moralia seems to have found this arrangement already existing. Perhaps at the 
place where this confusion arose, two books of the Hud. Ethics were inserted into the Nie. Hth. A differ 
ent order is proposed by Trendelenburg, Hist. Beitr. zwr Philos., 111. pp. 418-425. 


148 THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 


tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, politeta (a commonwealth of free citizens) and de- 
mocracy. He then treats (III. 14-17) of the first of the above forms, which under 
certain conditions is reckoned by him as the best possible, and (III. 18, and its con- 
tinuation: VII. and VIII.) of the good state, which is favored in respeet of its external 
conditions, and is based on the supremacy of the best men, 7. ¢., citizens who are virtuously 
educated. In Books IV. and Y. follows the inquiry concerning the other forms of the 
state besides monarchy and aristocracy, B. V. being especially occupied with the investi- 
gation of the causes of the preservation and destruction of governments; B. V. thus 
contains what, according to IV. 2, was to follow after the characterization and the descrip- 
tion of the genesis of the different forms of the state, viz.: the science of Political Nosology 
and Therapeutics. In B. VI. Aristotle treats supplementarily of the particular kinds of 
democracy and oligarchy and of the different offices in the state, the discussion having 
been very likely originally extended to other topics, including, in particular, the subject 
of laws. At least the second Book of the Economics is spurious. The πολιτεῖαι, a descrip- 
tion of the constitution of some 158 states, is lost. The Poetic (περὶ ποιητικῆς) is incom- 
plete in its present form. The Rhetoric, in three books, has been preserved. The Rhetor 
ad Alex. is spurious (according to Spengel—who edited it in 1844—Victorius, Buhle, and 
others, who found their rejection of it on Quintil., IIT. 4, 9). 

The chronological order in which the works of rigidly philosophical form were written 
can be for the most part, though not in all instances, determined with certainty; the 
interest belonging to the investigation of this subject is rather one of method than of 
development, since Aristotle seems to have composed these works (except, perhaps, those 
on logic) during his second residence at Athens, hence at a time when his philosophical 
development was already substantially complete. Frequently one work is cited in another. 
But these citations are in so many cases reciprocal, that it is scarcely possible to infer any 
thing from them as to the historical sequence of the works; such inférences can be drawn 
with perfect certainty only when a work is announced as yet to be written. The logical 
writings were probably composed the earliest (in Anal. Post., 11. 12, anticipatory reference 
is made to the Physics: μᾶλλον δὲ φανερῶς ἐν τοῖς καθόλου περὶ κινήσεως δεῖ λεχθῆναι περὶ 
αὐτῶν), and in the following order: Categories, Topica, Analytica, and still later the De 
Interpret., in which work the previous existence not only of the Analytica, but also of the 
Psychology, is affirmed by implication. Whether the ethical works (Eth. Nic. and Polit.) 
were written before (Rose) or after (Zeller) the physical and psychological, is question- 
able, though the former alternative is by far the more probable; Eth. Nic., 1.13, 1102 a, 26, 
presupposes only popular expositions of psychological problems (in the early dialogical 
works) and not the three books περὶ ψυχῆς, and VI. 4, init, points only to works of the 
same character on the difference between ποίησις and πρᾶξις: VI. 13, 1144a, 9, on the 
contrary, appears to imply the previous existence of the De Anima; but this book was 
also apparently not written by Aristotle, but by Eudemus. Aristotle could compose his 
ethical works before his psychological works, because (according to th. N., I. 13), though 
θεωρητέον τῷ πολιτικῷ περὶ ψυχῆς, yet this is necessary only ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἱκανῶς ἔχει πρὸς τὰ 
ζητούμενα, and ethics (Hth. N., Il. 2) is not a purely scientific but a practical doctrine. The 
Ethics and Politics were followed by the Poetic (to which anticipatory reference is made, 
Pol., VIII. 1), and the Rhetoric (which appears to be referred to, by anticipation, in Hyh., 11. 
7, p- 1108 Ὁ, 6); according to Rhet., I. 11, p. 1372a, 1; III. 2, p. 1404 b, 7, the Poetic pre- 
ceded the Rhetoric. That the Rhet. was composed immediately after the logical works 
(Rose) is scarcely to be credited; it must have been preceded not only by the logical but 
also by the ethico-political works, in accordance with the Aristotelian dicta, Rhet., I. 2, 
1356 a, 25, and 4, 1359 Ὁ, 9: τὴν ῥητορικὴν οἷον παραφυές τι τῆς διαλεκτικῆς evar καὶ THE περὶ 


THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 149 


τὰ ἤθη πραγματείας ἣν δίκαιόν ἐστι προσαγορεύειν πολιτικήν, and ἡ ῥητορικὴ σύγκειται EK TE Tre 
ἀναλυτικῆς ἐπιστήμης καὶ τῆς περὶ τὰ ἤθη πολιτικῆς. The works relating to physics were com- 
posed in the following order: Auscult. physicae, De Coelo, De Gener. et Corr., Meteorologica ; 
then followed the works relating to organic nature and psychical life. That the Metaphysics 
is of later date than the Physics (which Rose incorrectly places after the former) follows 
with certainty from Phys.,1.9, p. 192 a, 36: τῆς πρώτης φιλοσοφίας ἔργον ἐστὶ διορίσαι, ὡστε εἰς 
ἐκεῖνον τὸν καιρὸν ἀποκείσθω; in it the Analytics, Ethics, and Physics are cited. According to 
the statement of Asclepius (Schol. in Arist., p. 519b, 33), the Metaph. was not first edited 
immediately after the death of Aristotle by Eudemus, to whom Aristotle is said to have 
sent it, but very much later, from an imperfect copy, which was completed by additions from 
other Aristotelian works. From this review it results inductively that Aristotle advanced 
in a strictly methodical manner in the composition of his works from the πρότερον πρὸς ἡμᾶς 
to the πρότερον φύσει, in accordance with the didactic requirement, to which, with special 
reference to logic (analytics) and metaphysics (first philosophy), he gives expression in 
Met., TV. 3, p. 1005 Ὁ, 4, namely, that one must be familiar with the former before ὁ hear- 
ing” the latter. 

According to Strabo (XIII. 1, 54) and Plutarch (Vit. Suil., ch. 26) a strange fortune 
befell the works of Aristotle in the two centuries following the death of Theophrastus. 
The whole of the extensive library of Aristotle, including his own works, came first into 
the possession of Theophrastus, who left them to his pupil, Neleus of Skepsis in Troas; 
after his death they passed into the hands of his relatives in Troas, who, fearing lest the 
princes of Pergamus might seek to take them away for their own library, concealed them 
in a cellar or pit (διῶρυξ), where they suffered considerable injury from dampness. Accord- 
ing to Athenaeus, Deipnos., I. 3, this same library had been acquired by purchase for the 
Alexandrian Library in the time of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus ; but this, at least, can not be 
true of the original MSS. of Arist. and Theophrastus. These manuscripts were finally 
discovered (about 100 B. 6.) by Apellicon of Teos, a wealthy bibliophile, who bought them 
and carried them to Athens; he sought as well as possible to fill up the gaps, and gave 
the works to the public. Soon afterward, at the taking of Athens by the Romans (86 8. 0.) 
the manuscripts fell into the hands of Sulla. A grammarian named Tyrannion, from 
Amisos in Pontus (on him see Planer, De Tyranrione grammatico, Berlin, 1852), made use 
of them, and from him Andronicus of Rhodes, the Peripatetic, received copies, on the basis 
of which he (about 70 B. c.) set on foot a new edition of the works of Aristotle, and drew 
up a catalogue of them. Strabo brings the narrative, at least in the text of the Geographica 
as we now possess it, only down to Tyrannion; what relates to Andronicus is found in 
Plutarch. Strabo and Plutarch assume that in the period preceding their discovery by 
Apellicon, the principal works of Aristotle were inaccessible to students, or, in other 
words, that they existed only in the original manuscripts, and thus they explain the 
deviation of the later Peripatetics from Aristotle in doctrine; and by the numerous 
hiatuses in the badly disfigured manuscripts, which no one knew how to fill out correctly, 
they explain the unfortunate condition of the text of Aristotle in later times. But the 
supposition that all the philosophical works of Aristotle remained concealed from the 
public after the death of Aristotle is in itself scarcely credible, and is refuted by the traces 
(which Brandis, Spengel, Stahr, Zeller, and others have, with more or less of success, 
pointed out) of an acquaintance with some of the most important of the strictly philo- 
sophical works of Aristotle in the third and second centuries before Christ. The depo- 
sitions of Strabo and Plutarch respecting the fortune of the manuscripts are, however, 
of unquestionable authority, and it is quite possible that not only some rough draughts 
made by Aristotle, which were not intended for publication, but also some of the larger 


1580 THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE. 


works, in particular the Metaphysics, and perhaps also the Politica were first made publie 
after their discovery by Apellicon. (This is asserted in reference to the Psychology by E. 
Essen, in his Der Keller zu Skepsis, Stargard, 1866; the supposition is possible, that in the 
twofold recension in which parts of the second Book of the Psychology have come down 
‘to us, and in which perhaps the entire work at one time existed, we possess, on the one 
hand, the form which the work received from Alexandrian tradition, and, on the other, the 
form in which it appeared after its revision by Andronicus; still, it appears more probable 
that the one form is the Aristotelian, and that the other is the paraphrase of some Aris- 
totelian.) The theory that several of the chief philosophical works of Aristotle were 
unknown in the time from Theophrastus and Neleus to Apellicon and Andronicus, receives 
a certain confirmation from the list of Aristotle’s works in Diog. L., V. 22-27, in case this 
list was (as Nietzsche argues) not derived from the work of Andronicus on the works of 
Aristotle, but, through the works of Demetrius Magnes, and Diocles, from the work of 
Hermippus the Callimachean (at least, for the most part, and aside from certain additions 
taken from authorities belonging to the time after Andronicus). 

The edition set on foot by Andronicus gave new life to the study of the works of 
Aristotle. The Peripatetics of the following period distinguished themselves particularly 
as paraphrasts and commentators, as did also several of the Neo-Platonists, such as 
Themistius, Simplicius, and Philoponus. From the Greeks the writings of Aristotle passed 
(with the exception of the dialogical works, which were suffered to perish) into the hands 
of the Syrians and Arabians (see below, §§ 95 and 96). In the Christian schools some of 
the logical works of Aristotle and various expositions of the Aristotelian Logic by Boéthius 
and others, were employed as text-books; St. Augustine's recommendatien of dialectic 
served as an authority for their use. The principal works of Aristotle on logic were, 
however, not known even to the Scholastics until about the middle of the twelfth century, 
and then only in Latin translations. In the second half of the twelfth and in the course 
of the thirteenth century the physical, metaphysical, and ethical writings of Aristotle 
became also known in the Western world, at first (until near the year 1225) only through 
the agency of the Arabs, but afterward by means of direct translations from the Greek 
(see below, ἃ 98); some works, in particular, the Politics, in place of which the Arabians 
knew only of spurious works on the same subject, became known only through the latter 
channel. The translations from the Arabian are distorted to the extent of being com- 
pletely unintelligible; the direct translations from the Greek, and especially the translation 
of all or, at least, of very many of the works of Aristotle, which was made in about 1260— 
1270 by Wilhelm von Moerbecke, by request of Thomas Aquinas, are executed with such 
literal fidelity, as in many instances to enable us to infer from their form what was the 
reading of Codices on which they are based, but they are done without taste and not 
unfrequently express no meaning. The reading of the physical writings of Aristotle was 
forbidden in 1209 by a Provincial Council at Paris, on account of the doctrine of the 
eternity of the world and some other doctrines which they contained, but which, in fact, 
were misconceived and misrepresented; the reading of the physical and metaphysical 
writings was prohibited in 1215, by Robert of Courcon, the papal legate, on the occasion 
of his sanctioning the statutes of the University of Paris. This prohibition, which was 
renewed in a limited form in April, 1231, by Pope Gregory IX., remained formally in force 
until the year 1237 (according to the testimony of Roger Bacon, as cited by Emile Charles, 
Roger Bacon, Paris, 1861, pp. 314 and 412). But soon afterward, the judgment of the 
church concerning the works of Aristotle became more favorable. The Scholastics from 
this time on, depended, in philosophical respects, chiefly on the authority of Aristotle, 
although not abstaining from modifying in a measure some of his doctrines. In par- 








ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC. 151 


ticular, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, which became the prevalent philosophy among 
the teachers of the church, was Aristotelianism, and even other Scholastic systems, as 
those of Scotus and Occam, which were opposed to the system of St. Thomas, remained 
substantially true to the teaching of Aristotle. In 1254 the Physics and Metaphysics of 
Aristotle were included among the topics to be taught by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. 
The Ethics and Politics of Aristotle were likewise held in high estimation, although the 
Politics at least was studied with less zeal. At the revival of classical studies in the 
fifteenth century the renewal of Platonism detracted somewhat from the prestige and 
authority of Aristotle. Still the study of Aristotle received an essential impulse from the 
extending knowledge of the Greek language. New translations of his works, more cor- 
rect, more intelligible, and expressed in purer Latin, supplanted the old ones, aud soon 
numerous Latin and Greek editions of his works were published. At the Protestant 
universities the works of Aristotle were zealously studied, owing especially to the influ- 
ence of Melanchthon. In the sixteenth century nearly all of the works of Aristotle were 
frequently edited, translated, and commentated; in the seventeenth century considerably 
fewer, and during the greater part of the eighteenth century, with few exceptions, almost 
none. But toward the end of the eighteenth century a new interest in these works was 
awakened, an interest which still continues and seems even to be constantly increasing; 
and which manifests itself in numerous (above-cited) literary works. 


8. 41. The divisions of philosophy, according to Aristotle, are theo- 
retical, practical, and poetic. Theoretical philosophy is the scientific 
cognition of the existent, the end of the cognition being found in it- 
self. Practical philosophy is that form of πο which relates to 
action or conduct, and which prescribes rules for the latter. Poetic 
philosophy is a form of knowledge having reference to the shaping 
of material, or to the technically correct and artistic creation of 
works of art. Theoretical philosophy, again, is subdivided into 
mathematics, physics, and “ first philosophy ” (ontology or meta- 
physics). 

The analytical and dialectical investigations (in the “ Organon ”) 
were apparently intended as a methodological propzedeutic to phi- 
losophy, and not as a body of properly philosophical doctrine. Aris- 
totle’s conduct of them is, however, none the less for this reason 
strictly scientific. 

The various species of mental representations and of “ dicta” (or 
parts of speech) correspond, according to Aristotle, with definite 
forms of that which exists. The most universal forms of existence 
are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, pos- 
session, action, passion. The forms of representations, and so of 
possible affirmations or “ dicta respecting the existent,” which are 
conditioned by these forms of the representable, are denned by Aris- 
totle categories. The concept should represent the real essence of 


152 ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC. 


the objects included under it. Truth in a logical judgment is the’ 


correspondence of the combination of mental representations with a 
combination of things, or (in the case of the negative judgment) the 
correspondence of a separation of representations in the mind with a 
separation of things; falsity in judgments is the variation of the ideal 
combination or separation from the real relation of the things to 
which the judgments relate. Inference, or the derivation of one judg- 
ment from others, has two forms, the syllogism, which descends from 
the universal to the particular, and induction, which rises to the 
universal from a comparison of the single and particular. A scien- 
tific inference or a proof is an inference from true and certain 
principles ; a dialectical inference is a tentative inference from what 
appears true or even from mere (uncertain) indications; a sophistical 
inference is a paralogism or fallacy, depending on false premises or 
deceptive combination. The principle of contradiction and excluded 
middle is with Aristotle an ultimate metaphysical and logical prin- 
ciple, on which the possibility of demonstration and of all certain 
knowledge depends. Principles are known immediately by the rea- 
son. The prior and more knowable for us is the sensible, or that 
which in the order of conceptions is less general and hence less 
removed from the sphere of sensuous perception; but the really prior 
and more knowable are the principles, or at least those conceptions 
which are least removed in point of generality from principles. 


Of the more modern works on the whole System of Aristotle may be named: Franz Biese, Die Philoso- 
phie des Aristoteles (Vol. J., Logic and Metaphysics; Vol. 11.. The Special Sciences), Berlin. 1885-42 ; Chr. 
Aug. Brandis, Aristoteles, seine ukudemischen Zeitgenossen und nachsten Nachfolger, Berlin, 1853-57, or 
2d div. of the 2d part of his Handbueh der Gesch. der Grech.-kim. Philos., and Uebersicht tiber das 
Arist. Lehrgebande, 1st div. of the 8d part, Berlin, 1860: Ed. Zeller, Arisioteles und die alten Peri- 
patetiker, Tibingen, 1861, 2d diy. of the 2d part of the 2d ed. of his “ Philos, der Griechen.” Ch. Thurot 
(Etudes sur Aristote, Paris, 1860) treats of the Politics, Dialectic,and Rhetoric of Aristotle. Cf. F. Meunier, 
Ar. a-t-il eu deux doctrines, Cune ostensible, Vautre secréte? Paris, 1864. Otto Caspari’s Die Irrthiimer 
der altclass. Philosophie in ihrer Bedeutung fiir das philos. Princip (Heidelberg, 1868) treats prin- 
cipally of Platonism and Aristotelianism, and in particular of the theory of ideas and the theory of knowl- 
edge. [Thomas Taylor, Diss. on the Philos. of Aristotle, London, 1813.— 77.) 

Of special works relating to the Aristotelian Logie may be named: F. J.C. Francke, De Arist. iis argu- 
mentandi modis, qui recedunt a perfecta sylogismi forma, Rostock, 1824; Car. Weinholtz, De Finibus 
atque Pretio Logicae Aristotelicae, ib., 1825; Ad. Trendelenburg, De Arist. categoriis prolusio academica, 
Berlin, 1833, Geschichte der Kategorienlehre, ib., 1846, pp. 1-195, 209-217, Hlementa logices Aristoteleae, 
ib., 1836, 6th ed, 1868, Hrlduterungen zur Arist. Logik, Berlin, 1842, 2d ed., 1861 (cf. on these works Max 
Schmidt and G. H. Heidtmann, in the Zeitschr. 7. d. Gymnasialvesen, V. V1. VII. 1851-53); Phil. Gam- 
posch, Ueber die Logik und die logischen Schriften des Aristoteles, Leipsic, 1839; Herm, Rassow, Aris- 
totelis de notionis definitione doctrina, Berlin, 1843; H. Hettner, De logices Aristotelicae speculativo 
principio, Halle, 1843; Car. Kithn, De notionis dejinitione qualem Arist. constitwerit, Halle, 1844; A. 
Vera, Platonis, Aristotelis et Hegeliit de medio termino doctrina, Paris, 1845; A. L. Gastmann, De gnethodo 
philos. Arist., Groningen, 1845; C. L. W. Heyder, Aritische Darstellung und Vergleichung der Aria- 
totelischen und Hegel’schen Dialektik (1 Bd., 1 Abth.; die Methodologie der Arist. Philos. und der 
Sriiheren Systeme), Erlangen, 1845; G. Ph. Chr. Kaiser, De logica Pauli Apostoli logices Aristoteleae 





ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC. 153 


emendatrice (Progr.), Erlangen, 1847; Carl Prantl, Ueber die Entwickelung der Aristotelischen Logik aus 
der Platonischen Philosophie, in the Abh, der Bair, Akad. der Wiss., hist.-phil, Classe, Vol. V11., part 
1st, pp. 129-211, Munich, 1853 (cf. the sections on the same topic in Prantl’s Gesch. der Logik); H. Bonitz, 
Ueber die Kategorien des Aristoteles, in the Sitewngsberichte der Wiener Akad. der Wiss., hiast.-~philol. 
Cl., Vol. X., 1858, pp. 59:-645; A. F. C. Kersten, Quo jure Kantius Arist. categorias rejecerit (Progr. of 
the Realgymn. at Cologne), Berlin, 1853; E. Essen, Die Definition nach Aristoteles (G.-Pr.), Stargard, 
1864; J. Hermann, Quae Arist. de ultimis cognoscendi principiis docuerit, Berlin, 1864; Aristotle on 
Fallacies, or the Sophistic Elenchi, with a translation and notes, by Edward Poste, London, 1866; [The 
Logie of Science, a transl. of the Later Analytics of Aristotle, with an Introd. and Notes, by the same, 
London.—7r.]; Wilh. Schuppe, Die Arist. Kategorien (in the * Progr.” of the Gleiwitz Gymn. on the 
occasion of the celebration of the founding of the institution, April 29, 1866), Gleiwitz, 1866; A. Wentzke, 
Die Kategorien des Urtheils im Anchluss an Arist., erldutert und begriindet (G.-Pr.), Culm, 1868; 
Friedr. Zelle, Der Unterschied in der Auffussung der Logik bei Arist. und bei Kant, Berlin, 1870; Fried 
Ferd. Kampe, Die Erkenntnisstheorie des Arist., Leipsic, 1870, 


Of the Aristotelian conception of philosophy we have treated above (p. 3 seq.). We 
find a division of the system of philosophy, not very different from that adopted by Plato, 
in the Topica (1. 14. p. 105 Ὁ, 19): ‘‘ Philosophical problems and theorems are either ethical, 
physical, or logical (ἠθικαί, φυσικαί, or λογικαί)," where by “logical” theorems are to be 
understood such as have a universal reference, or in which the specifically physical or 
ethical character is left out of consideration; theorems, in other words, which belong to 
metaphysics (or ontology). But this division is given here by Aristotle only as a pro- 
visional sketch (ὡς τύπῳ περιλαβεῖν). Where Aristotle expresses his opinion more 
exactly, he divides philosophy (in the sense of scientific knowledge in general) in the 
manner indicated at the beginning of this paragraph, Metaph, VI. 1: πᾶσα διάνοια ἢ 
πρακτικὴ ἢ ποιητικὴ ἢ Sewpytixy.  Metaph., XI. 7: δῆλον τοίνυν, ὅτε τρία γένη τῶν ϑεω- 
ρητικῶν ἐστί " φυσική, μαϑηματική, ϑεολογική (the latter identical with πρώτη φιλοσοφία, which 
with Aristotle culminates in theology). ΤῸ each of the different branches of philosophy 
Aristotle assigns a definite rank, the first place being given to the theoretical sciences. 
Of these latter, again, he pronounces “theology” (θεολογικῆ) to be the highest, because it 
has the highest of objects—following the principle, that the value of each science is in 
accordance with the value of its peculiar object: βελτίων δὲ καὶ χείρων ἑκάστη λέγεται 
κατὰ τὸ οἰκεῖον ἐπιστητόν (Metaph., XI. 7). Aristotelians divided practical philosophy into 
Ethics (in the narrower sense), Giccnomics, and Politics (Eth. Hudem., I. 8: πολιτική, 
οἱκονομικὴ καὶ φρόνησις), and in like manner Aristotle (ἐλ. Nic., VI. 9) co-ordinates οἰκονομία 
and πολιτεία with φρόνησις (moral insight, on which morality in the individual is held 
to depend). But where he defines himself more exactly, Aristotle describes @conomics, 
together with Rhetoric and Generalship, as sciences auxiliary to Politics. By Politics, in 
the broader sense of the term, Aristotle understands the whole of the ethical sciences, 
among which Ethics and the Doctrine of the State (Politics in the narrower sense) are 
included (Hth. N.. 1.1; X. 10; Jhet., I. 2). Poetic philosophy in its general conception is 
equivalent with Aristotle to technology in general, 7. e., the doctrine of shapes or images 
in any material; but the special doctrine of the ‘‘imitative” arts, regarded in its philo- 
sophical bearings. is the-same with our modern ‘“‘ 4sthetics,” of which only the theory of 
Poetry (Poetics) was actually worked out by Aristotle. As Logic in the modern sense, or the 
Aristotelian Analytics, has no place in this division, Aristotle may be supposed to have re- 
garded it only as a propzedeutic doctrine. With this agrees his above-cited declaration (Aet., 
1V. 3) of the necessity of being acquainted with it before studying metaphysics, a declara- 
tion which indeed places logic in a propeedeutic relation only to metaphysics (and in so far 
favors the supposition that Aristotle included it in πρώτη φιλοσοφία, as a formal introduc- 
tion to the same), but which implies, nevertheless, a like propzdeutic relation to ethics and 
hysics, in so far as the logical method, with which the student of philosophy must be 


oye lH, ee FTL 7 3 
A eg asicke At, ices Ge LU" “NEL ἀξ σας 





154 ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC. 


previously familiar, is not only the method of metaphysics, but also of every philosophicat 
discipline, including, therefore, ethics and physics. (This method is, of course, also the 
method of logic itself; on the circle thus resulting and its solution, cf. my System of 
Logic, § 4.) 

The Analytica of Aristotle (together with the other works accompanying it) contain an 
exposition of the forms of inference and of cognitive thought in general, thought being 
resolved, as it were, into content and form, and the latter being made the special subject 
of consideration. ruth in knowledge is the agreement of knowledge with reality ( Categ., 
c. 12: τῷ yap εἶναι τὸ πρᾶγμα ἢ μὴ ἀληϑὴς ὁ λόγος ἢ ψευδὴς λέγεται). This dictum is 
thus particularized, in Met, ΤΥ. 7, with reference to the various possible cases: “‘ Affirming 


non-existence of the existent, or existence of the non-existent, is falsehood; but affirming 
tent, so also the forms of thought are viewed by Aristotle in their relation to reality. The 
various kinds of words or of expressions, considered apart from all grammatical connection 
(τὰ κατὰ μηδεμίαν συμπλοκὴν λεγόμενα, De Cat., c. 4), represent so many ways of making 
“affirmations concerning the existent,” or so many categories (γένη τῶν κατηγοριῶν, KaTH- 
yopiat Tov ὄντος or τῶν ὄντων), and denote, accordingly, either 1) substance (οὐσία or τί ἐστι), 
as examples of which Aristotle mentions man, horse, or 2) quantity (ποσόν), 6. g., two or 
three yards long, or 3) quality (ποιόν), 6. g., white, grammatical, or 4) relation (πρός τι), 6. g., 
double, half, greater, or 5) place (ποὺ), 6. g., in the Lyceum, in the market-place, or 6) time 
(ποτέ), 6. g., yesterday, last year, or 7) position (κεῖσθαι), 6. g., lies, sits, or 8) possession 
(ἔχειν), 6. g., is shod, armed, or 9) action (ποιεῖν), 6. g., cuts, burns, or 10) passion (tac yeu), 
6. g., is cut, burnt. The correspondence of the forms of speech with the forms of being is 
-expressly affirmed by Aristotle (Metaph., V. 1: ὁσαχῶς yap λέγεται, τοσαυταχῶς τὸ εἶναι 
σημαίνε). The forms of representations (or categories) and the parts of speech being 
alike conditioned on the forms of existence, the former correspond with the latter. Thus, 
in particular (according to Trendelenburg), the category of Substance corresponds with the 
Substantive (ὄνομα), while the other categories, collectively, correspond with the ῥῆμα, in 
the wider sense (of Predicate) in which Aristotle employs this term; and, more particularly, 
the categories of Quantity, Quality, and Relation with the Adjective and Numeral and 
certain Adverbs, the categories of place and time with the Adverbs (or Adverbial Expres- 
sions) of place and time, the category of Position with the Intransitive Verb, that of Pos- 
session with the Perf. Pass., that of Action with the Active Verb, and that of Passion with 
the Pass. Verb. While, however, this correspondence exists in a measure de facto, it is 
less evident that it was expressly indicated by Aristotle; least of all is it certain that the 
Aristotelian categories arose from the observation of the different parts of speech. The 
theory of the parts of speech is in its first beginnings with Aristotle, and was first developed 
by later writers; besides, the correspondence in question is not in all respects exact (Zeller, 
Ph. ἃ. Gr., ΤΙ. 2, 2d ed., p. 190 seq.). Aristotle seems to have had in view more the parts 
of the sentence than the different kinds of words, or rather he seems not yet to have distin- 
guished between the two. (Cf, on the relation of the forms of reality to the forms of 
representations and the parts of speech, in the Aristotelian theory of categories, Ueber- 
weg, System der Logik, ὃ. 47, 2d ed., Bonn, 1865, p. 92.) In all the works of Aristotle com- 
posed after the De Cat. (supposing this vies genuine) and the Topica, the number of 
eategories is reduced from ten to eight,’ Reco8ai and yen being ἃ omitted, probably because 
Aristotle found that both might be eaeatae under other categories. So Anal. Post., 1. 22, 
p. 88 8, 21 and Ὁ, 15 (in which latter passage there can be no doubt that a full enumera- 
tion was intended), Phys. V. 1 (where likewise completeness is necessarily implied), and 
Met, V.%. Prantl, in his Gesch. der Logik (I. p. 207), gives a schematized harmony of all 


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ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC. 155 


the passages in Aristotle where categories are mentioned. According to Prantl (p. 209), 
the essential import of the doctrine of categories is perceived, when we regard it, not as a 
complete enumeration of the forms of existence and thought, but as an expression of the 
truth that substance (οὐσία) appears, determined in respect of space and time (ποῦ, ποτέ) 
and quality (ποιόν), in the world of things numerable and measurable (ποσόν), and that 
within the sphere of manifold existence it shows itself active according to its determinate 
character (ποιεῖν, πάσχειν͵ πρός τι). In Analyt. Post., I. 22, all the other categories are 
contrasted with Substance, as accidents (συμβεβηκότα). In Met., XIV. 2, p. 1089 Ὁ, 23, 
three classes are distinguished: τὰ μὲν γὰρ οὐσίαι, ta δὲ πάθη, τὰ δὲ πρός τι, substances, 
attributes, and relations. Οὐσία, as a category, denotes the independent, the substantial. 
But in another sense it signifies the essential; this latter is the object of the concept 
(λόγος). The concept is an expression of the essence of the objects which it denotes (λόγος 
τῆς οὐσίας, Cat. 1; ὁ λόγος τὴν οὐσίαν ὁρίζει, De Part. Anim., IV. 5), and the essence 
corresponds to the concept (ἡ κατὰ λόγον οὐσία). That, in any thing, which is extraneous 
to the essence (ovcia) of the thing—which exists, so to speak, as an appendage to the 
essence—is accidental (συμβεβηκός). Accidents are of two kinds, some being necessarily 
connected with the essential, so that we can deduce them apodictically from the latter, 
and others being not thus deducible; the former belong to the object, in which they 
inhere, as such, or to the conception of the object (συμβεβηκός καθ᾽ αὑτό", thus it is a 
necessary accident of the triangle that the sum of all its angles should be equal to two 
right angles); the latter are truly accidental (συμβεβηκός in the ordinary sense). In Defi- 
nition (ὁρισμός) we cognize the essence of the thing defined (Anal. Post., 11. 3). Through 
the combination (συμπλοκῇ) of representations determined according to the specified cate- 
gories arise the Judgment and its expression, the Proposition (ἀπόφανσις), which latter 
may be either an gfirmation (κατάφασις) or a negation (ἀπόφασις). Every proposition is 
necessarily either true or false; not so are the uncombined elements of the proposition 
(De Cat., c. 4). Hence the Principle of Contradiction and of Excluded Third or Middle, in 
its logical form (De Cat., c.10): “ΟΥ̓ the affirmation and the negation of the same thing, 
the one is always false, the other true;” Met, IV. 7: ‘‘ Between the two terms of a con- 
tradiction there isno mean; it is necessary either to affirm or to deny every predicate of 
every subject.” The metaphysical or ontological form of the principle of contradiction 
(ἡ. e., a8 applied to Being itself), on which the validity of the logical form depends, is thus 
expressed (Metaph., IV. 3): τὸ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ 
καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό͵ ‘‘The same thing can not at the same time and in the same respect 
belong and not belong to the same thing.” Of the principle in this form, no proof, accord- 
ing to Aristotle, is possible, but only a subjective conviction, that no one can deny it in 
thought. Τὸ ἅπαν φάναι ἢ ἀποφάναι [the principle of excluded middle] is expressly declared 
by Aristotle (Anal. Post. I. 11) to be the principle of indirect proof. He defines the Syl- 
logism (Zop., 1.1; ef. Anal. Pri, I. 1) as a form of ratiocination, in which, from certain 
premises and through the force of those premises, there follows necessarily a conclusion 
different from the premises (ἐστὶ δὴ συλλογισμὸς λόγος ἐν ᾧ τεϑέντων τινῶν ἕτερόν τι τῶν 
κειμένων ἐξ ἀνάγκης συμβαίνει διὰ τῶν κειμένων). He assumes (Anal. Pri., I. 4-6, ef. 32; 
ef. the citations ad § 103 in my System of Logic) three syllogistic figures, according as the 
middle term (ὅρος μέσος) is either subject in one of the premises (προτάσεις) and predicate 
in the other (first figure), or predicate in both premises (second figure), or subject in both 
(third figure). A syllogism which is correct in form has either apodictic or dialectic 
validity, according to the relation of the premises to objective truth. Top., I. 1: “᾿Από- 
δειξις [real demonstration] takes place when we conclude from true and ultimate premises, 
or at least from premises which have been proved true on the ground of other true and 


156 ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC. 


ultimate premises; the Dialectic Syllogism, on the contrary, concludes ἐὲ évoéfov .... and 
ἔνδοξα are principles which appear true to the mass of men, or to the educated, or to indi- 
viduals whose opinion is specially worthy of respect.’ An additional form of inference is 
the Eristic Syllogism, which concludes from premises having only an apparent or alleged, 
but no real probability. With the dialectical syllogism agrees, in the want of a strictly 
scientific or apodictical character, the Rhetorical Syllogism, but it differs from the former 
in its use, the former being an instrument of examination, while the latter (which concludes 
“from probabilities or signs,” and produces only a subjective conviction—éé εἰκότων 7 
σημείων) is an instrument of persuasion. In the province of demonstration rhetoric occu- 
pies the same place as dialectic in the province of examination, inasmuch as each is con- 
versant with material which in some sense is the property of all men, and which belongs 
to no particular science (κοινὰ τρόπον τινὰ ἁπάντων ἐστὶ γνωρίζειν. καὶ οὐδεμιᾶς ἐπιστήμης 
ἀφωρισμένης), and as each deals only with the probable, whence Rhetoric forms the natural 
counterpart of Dialectic (Rhet.I.1: ἡ ῥητορικὴ ἀντίστροφος τῇ διαλεκτικῇ, cf. Cic., Orat., ο. 32: 
quasi ex altera parte respondens dialecticae; Dialectic teaches ἐξετάζειν καὶ ὑπέχειν λόγον, and 
Rhetorie ἀπολογεῖσθαι καὶ κατηγορεῖν). A form of investigation akin to the dialectical is 
the logical, ὁ. ¢., the investigation of a topic in the light of universal conceptions alone 
(especially in the light of metaphysical conceptions, or such as belong to “first phi- 
losophy ”), in distinction from that method which looks rather to the particular or to that 
which is peculiar (οἰκεῖον) to the subject of investigation, and which, therefore, in the depart- 
ment of physics, “investigates physically” (φυσικῶς ζητεῖν, De Gen. et Corr., 316 a, 10, et al.), 
in the department of analytics, “analytically” (ἀναλυτικῶς ζητεῖν), ete. (See Thurot, Etudes 
sur Aristote, Paris, 1860, p. 118 seq.) The Middle Term in that syllogism which is most 
important as an instrument of cognition, corresponds with and expresses an objective cause 
(Analyt. Post., 11. 2: τὸ μὲν yap αἴτιον τὸ μέσον, cf. my Syst. of Logic, § 101). In Induction 
(ἐπαγωγῇ, ὁ ἐξ ἐπαγωγῆς συλλογισμός) we conclude from the observation that a more gen- 
eral concept includes (several or) all of the individuals included under another concept of 
inferior extension, that the former concept is a predicate of the latter (Anal. Pri., II. 23). 
Induction leads from the particular to the universal (ἀπὸ τῶν καθέκαστα ἐπὶ τὰ καθόλου 
édodoc, Top., 1.10). The term ἐπαγωγῇ, for Induction, suggests the ranging of particular 
cases together in files, like troops. The Complete Induction, according to Aristotle, is the 
only strictly scientific induction; the Incomplete Induction, which with a syllogism sub- 
joined constitutes the Analogical Inference (παράδειγμα), is principally of use to the orator. 
Considered absolutely, the Syllogism proper, which arrives through the middle term at 
the major term as the predicate of the minor (ὁ διὰ τοῦ μέσου συλλογισμός), is more 
rigorous, prior in nature, and more demonstrative (φύσει πρότερος καὶ γνωριμώτερος, Anal. 
Pri., 11. 23; βιαστικώτερον καὶ πρὸς τοὺς ἀντιλογικοὺς évepyéotepov, Top., I. 12); but the 
Inductive Syllogism easier for us to understand (ἡμῖν évapyéorepoc, Anal. Pri., 11. 23; πειϑα- 
νώτερον καὶ σαφέστερον καὶ κατὰ τὴν αἴσϑησιν γνωριμώτερον καὶ τοῖς πολλοῖς κοινόν, Top., 
J. 12). Universally, ‘‘the prior and more cognizable for us” is what lies nearest to the 
sphere of sensation, but “the absolutely prior and more cognizable” is what is most 
remote from that sphere (Analyt. Post. 1. 2: πρὸς ἡμᾶς μὲν πρότερα καὶ γνωριμώτερα τὰ 
ἐγγύτερον τῆς αἰσϑήσεως͵ ἁπλῶς δὲ πρότερα καὶ γνωριμώτερα τὰ ποῤῥώτερον). The limits 
of knowledge are, on the one hand, the individual, on the other, the most general. In 
itself it is better—because more scientific—to pass from the ‘prior in nature” to the 
“prior for us,” from the condition to the conditioned; but for those who can not follow 
this order, the inverse one must be employed (Zop., VI. 4). The most general principles 
are insusceptible of demonstration, because all (direct) demonstration presupposes, as its 
basis or premise, something more general than that which is to be proved; and some- 


- 


ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS. 157 


thing, also, which must be at least as obvious and certain, or even more so, than the thing 
to be proved; the most general truths, therefore, must be immediately certain (Anal. Post., 
I. 2; ef. my System of Logic, § 135). The absolutely first truths in science must consist 
of indemonstrable definitions (ra πρῶτα ὁρσιμοὶ ἔσονται ἀναπόδεικτοι, Anal. Post., 11. 3). 
These principles (as they are called, or apyaz) are the objects of reason (νοῦς); whatever is 
universally and necessarily derived from them is the object of science (ἐπεστήμη), while 
opinion (δόξα), whose characteristic is instability (ἀβέβαιον), is concerned with whatever is 
subject to variation (Anal. Post., I. 33; II. 19), 


§ 48. In the “First Philosophy,” or, as it was subsequently 
termed, the Metaphysics of Aristotle, the principles common to all 
spheres of reality are considered. The number of these principles, 
as given by Aristotle, is four, viz.: Form or Essence, Matter or Sub- 
stratum, Moving or Efficient Cause, and End. The principle of 
Form or Essence is the Aristotelian substitute for the Platonic Idea. 
Aristotle argues against the Platonic (or, at least, what he held as 
the Platonic) view, that the Ideas exist for themselves apart from the 
concrete objects which are copied from them, affirming, however, on 
his own part, that the logical, subjective concept has a real, objective 
correlate, in the essence immanent in the objects of the concept. As 
the one apart from and beside the many the Idea does not exist ; none 
the less must a unity be assumed as (objectively) present 77 the many. 
The word substance (οὐσία) in its primary and proper signification 
belongs to the concrete and individual; only in a secondary sense can 
it be applied to the Genus. But although the universal has no inde- 
pendent existence apart from the individual, it is yet first in worth 
and rank, most significant, most knowable by nature and the proper 
subject of knowledge. This, however, is true, not of every common 
notion, but only of such notions as represent the Essential in the 
individual objects. These universal notions combine in one whole all 
the essential attributes of their objects, both the generic and the 
specific attributes ; they represent the essential Form, to denote which 
Aristotle employs the expressions εἶδος, μορφή, ἡ κατὰ τὸν λόγον οὐσία 
and τὸ τί ἣν εἶναι (form, intelligible or notional essence.—TZ7.]. The 
matter in which form inheres is not absolutely non-existent ; it exists as 
possibility or capacity (δύναμις, potentia). Form, on the contrary, is 
the accomplishment, the realization (ἐντελέχεια, ἐνέργεια, actus) of this 
possibility. Relatively, however, matter may be styled non-existent, 
in so far as it denotes the as yet uneffectuated existence of the finished 
shape or thing (in which form and matter are united). The opposite 
of entelechy or actuality is deprivation, want, non-possession (στέρησις). 


158 ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS. 


No matter exists aitogether deprived of form; the idea of mere mat- 
ter is a pure abstraction. But there does exist an immaterial form- 
principle, and this principle is the form which has “separable” or 
independent existence (χωρεστόν), in distinction from the inseparable 
forms which inhere in matter. Form, in the organic creation, is at 
once form, end, and moving cause. Matter is the passive, deter- 
minable factor, and is the ultimate source of imperfection in things. 
But it is also the principle of individuation in things, form being 
not (as Plato asserts) the ground of unity, but only of homo- 
geneous plurality. Motion or change (κίνησις) is the passage of 
potentiality into reality. All motion implies an actual moving cause. 
Now, in the sphere of existence we find included that which is per- 
petually moved and that which both moves and is moved; there 
exists, therefore, a tertiwm quid, which is always imparting motion 
but is itself unmoved. This fertiwm is God, the immaterial and 
eternal Form, the pure Actuality in which is no potentiality, the self- 
thinking Reason or absolute Spirit, who, as absolutely pertect, is 
loved by all, and into the image of whose perfection all things seek 
to come. 


Scholia graeca in Arist. Metaphysica ed., Ch. A. Brandis, Berlin, 18387. <Alerandri Aphrodisiensis 
commentarius in libros Metaphys. Arist., rec. Herm. Bonitz, Berlin, 1847. 

On the metaphysical principles of Aristotle, as compared with those of Plato, the following authors 
may be consulted: Chr. Herm. Weisse, De Platonis et Aristotelis in constituendis summis philos. prin- 
cipiis differentia, Leipsic, 1828; M. Carriére, De Aristotele Platonis amico ejusque doctrinae justo 
censore, Gott. 1837; Th. Waitz, Plato und Aristoteles, in the Transactions of the 6th Reunion of German 
philologists at Cassel, 1848; F. Michelis, De Aristotele Platonis in idearwm doctrina adversario, 
Braunsberg, 1864; οἵ, Ed. Zeller. Plat. Studien (ΤῸΝ. 1837, pp. 197-800: On Aristotle’s account of Plato’s 
Philosophy), Ueberweg, Platon. Untersuchungen (Vienna, 1861, pp. 177-180), and W. Rosenkranz, Die 
Plat. Ideenlehre und ihre Bekdmpfung durch Aristoteles, Mayence, 1569 (reprinted from Rosenkranz’s 
Wissenschajt des Wissens, Mayence, 1868-1869). F. Brentano treats of the various significations of exist- 
ence according to Aristotle ( Von der mannigfuchen Bedeutung des Scienden nach Aristoteles, Freiburg 
in Breisgau, 1862). G. v. Hertling treats of the Aristotelian conception of the One (in a Diss. Bri.), 
Freiburg, 1864. Osc. Weissenfels, De casu et substantia Arist. (diss. inaug.), Berlin, 1866. K. G. Michaélis, 
Zur Erklarung von Arist. Metaph. Ζ. 9 (G.-Pr.), Neu-Strelitz, 1866. ἃ. Heyne, De Arist. casu et con- 
tingente (diss. inaug.), Halle, 1866. On the form-principle, see F. A. Trendelenburg (τὸ ἑνὶ εἶναι, τὸ 
ἀγαθῷ εἶναι, τὸ τί ἣν εἶναι bet Aristoteles, in the Rhein. Mus. f. Ph., 11. 1828, p. 457 seq.; ef. T.’s edition of 
the De Anima, pp. 192 seq., 471 seq.; Gesch. der Kutegorienlehre, p. 84 seq.) ; see also the works by Biese, 
Heyder, Kiihn, Rassow, Waitz, and Schwegler, already cited (the passages bearing on this subject are indi- 
cated by Schwegler in his edition of Aristotle’s Met., Vol. IV. p. 369 seq.), and C. Th. Anton, De discrimine 
inter Aristotelicum τὶ ἐστι et τί jv εἶναι (Progr.), Gorlitz, 1847. A. de Roaldes, Les Penseurs du jour et 
Aristotele, traité des étres substantiels, Meaux, 1868. On the Aristotelian expression ὃ ποτε ὄν (which 
points to the substratum, or ὑποκείμενον, 6. g. 2 ὃ ποτε ὃν φερόμενόν ἐστι, “whatever it may be [7%. e., any 
object, such as a stone, a piece of wood, a point] that is involved in progressive motion”), see Ad. Torstrik, 
in the Rhein. Mus., new series, XII. 1857, pp. 161-173. G. Engel writes of the ὕλη of Arist. in the Rhein. 
Mus. f. Ph., new series, VII. 1850, pp. 891-418. On the Hntelechy of Aristotle, see J. P. F. Ancillon, Re- 
cherches critiques et philosophiques sur Ventéléchie @ Aristote, in the Transactions of the Berlin Acad. 
of Sciences, Philos, Class, 1804-11. On the Aristotelian doctrine of necessity, works have been published 
by Ferd. Kittner (Diss., Berlin, 1853), and Eug. Pappenheim (Diss. Halensis, Berlin, 1856). Of his doc- 
trine of jinality treat M. Carriére (Teleologiae Arist. lineamenta, Berlin, 1888), and Gustay Schneider 


ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS. 159 


(Quae sit causae finalis apud Arist. vis atque natura, diss, inaug., Berlin, 1864, and more fully in his 
. De Causa finali Aristotelea, Berlin, 1865); cf. Trendelenburg, Log. Untersuch, 24 ed., Leipsic, 1862, 11. 
p- 65 seq. 

The Theology of Aristotle is discussed by Vater ( Vindiciae theologiae Arist., Halle 1795), Simon 
(De deo Arist., Paris, 1839), Krische (Forschungen, I. pp. 258-811), C. Zell (De Arist. patriarum 
religionum aestimatore, Heidelb. 1847; Arist. in seinem Verhdltniss zur griech. Staatsreligion, in 
Ferienschriften, new series, Vol. I., Heidelb. 1857, pp. 291-892; Das Verhaltniss der Arist. Philos. zur 
Religion, Mayence, 1863), E. Reinhold (Arist. theologia contra falsam Hegelianam interpretationem 
defenditur, Jena, 1848), O. H. Weichelt (Zheologumena Aristotelea, Berlin, 1552), F. v. Reindbl 
(Darstellung des Arist. Gottesbegriffs und Vergleichung desselben mit dem Platonischen, Jena, 1854), 
A. L. Kym (Die Gotteslehre des Aristoteles und das Christenthwm, Zurich, 1862), J. P. Romang (Die 
Gottesl. des Ar. wu. ἃ. Chr., in the Protest. Kirchenzeitung, 1862, No. 42), F. G. Starke (Aristotelis de 
unitate Dei sententia (G.-Pr.], Neu-Ruppin, 1864), L. F. Goetz (Der Arist. Gottesbegriff, contained in 
Festgabe, den aiten Crucianern zur Einweihung des neuen Schulgeb. gewidmet, etc., Dresden, 1866, pp. 
87-67). Other works, both new and old, are cited by Schwegler in his edition of the Jletaphysics, Vol. 1V. 
p. 257. The Pseudo-Aristotelian work, Theologia, of Neo-Platonic origin, translated in the ninth century 
into Arabic, known to the Scholastics in a Latin re-traaslation, first printed at Rome in 1519, and included 
in Du Val’s and other editions of Aristotle (1629, II. pp. 1035 seq., and 1639, pp. 608 seq.) is the subject of an 
essay by Haneberg in the Reports of the Munich Acad. of Sci., 1862, I. pp. 1-12; Haneberg treats (ibid. 
1862, I. pp. 861-888) of the book De Causis, included in the early Latin editions of Aristotle ( Vernet. 1496 
and 1550-1552) as a work of Aristotle, but which in reality was extracted from Neo-Platonic works, and in 
particular from the Znstit. Theol. of Proclus or one of his disciples. Cf. below, § 97. 


Reviewing the various orders of human knowledge (Metaph., I., cc. 1 and 2), Aristotle 
remarks that the experienced man (ἔμπειρος) is justly considered wiser than he whose 
knowledge is restricted to single perceptions and recollections; the man of theoretic 
knowledge (ὁ τεχνίτης), than the merely experienced; the director of an undertaking 
involving the application of art or skill, than he who is engaged in it merely as a manual 
laborer; and, finally, he whose life is devoted to science (which relates to being—év— 
as art, τέχνη, does to becoming, yévecic, Anal. Pos., 11. 19), than he who seeks knowl- 
edge only in view of its application to practical uses: but in the sphere of scientific 
knowledge, he adds, that is the highest which respects the highest or ultimate reasons 
and causes of things: this highest in knowledge is “first philosophy,” or wisdom, in the 
strict and absolute sense of the word (σοφία, see above, 8 1, pp. 3 and 4). 

The four formal principles of Aristotle, form, matter, efficient cause, and end, are enu- 
merated in Met, 1. 8 (cf. V.2; VIII. 4; Phys., II. 3), in the following terms: τὰ αἴτια 
λέγεται τετραχῶς, ὧν μίαν μὲν αἰτίαν φαμὲν εἶναι τὴν οὐσίαν καὶ τὸ Ti ἣν elvat,... ἑτέραν 
δὲ τὴν ὕλην καὶ τὸ ὑποκείμενον, τρίτην δὲ ὅϑεν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως, τετάρτην δὲ τὴν ἀντι- 
κειμένην αἰτίαν ταύτῃ, τὸ ov ἔνεκα καὶ τἀγαϑόν͵ τέλος γὰρ γενέσεως καὶ κινήσεως πάσης 
τοῦτ᾽ ἐστιν. The oldest Greek philosophers, as Aristotle attempts in a comprehensive 
review of their doctrines (Metaph., I. 3 seq.) to demonstrate, inquired only after the mate- 
rial principle. Empedocles and Anaxagoras, he adds, inquired, further, after the cause of 
motion. The principle of essence or form was not clearly stated by any among the earlier 
philosophers, though the authors of the theory of ideas came nearest to it. The prin- 
ciple of finality was enounced by earlier philosophers only in a partial or comparative 
semse, and not as a complete and independent principle. 

Aristotle opposes numerous objections (Metaph., I. 9, XIII. and XIV.) to the Platonie 
theory of ideas, some of which relate to the demonstrative force of the arguments for that 
theory, while others are urged against the tenableness of the theory itself. The argument 
founded on the real existence of scientific knowledge, says Aristotle, is not stringent; the 
reality of the universal does indeed follow from the fact in question, but not its detached 
existence; did this follow, however, then from the same premises much else would fol- 
low, which the Platonists neither do nor can admit, such as the existence of ideas of 


“ας 


100 ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS. 


works of art, of the non-substantial, of the attributive and the relative; for these things, 
too, possess ideal unity (τὸ νόημα év). But if the existence of ideas is assumed, the 
assumption is useless and leads to the impossible. The theory of ideas is useless; for 
the ideas are only an aimless duplication of sensible things (a sort of αἰσθητὰ ἀΐδια, 
eternal sensibles), to which they are of no service, since they are not the causes of any 
motion in them, nor of any change whatever; neither do they help things to exist, 
nor us to know things, since they are not immanent in the common objects of our 
knowledge. But the hypothesis of the existence of ideas leads also to the impossible. 
It is affirmed of these ideas that they express the essence of their respective objects; 
but it is impossible that an essence and that of which it is the essence should exist 
apart (δόξειεν ἂν ἀδύνατον, εἶναι χωρὶς τὴν οὐσίαν καὶ οὗ ἡ οὐσία); furthermore, the 
imitation of the ideas in individual objects, which Plato teaches, is inconceivable, and 
the expression contains only a poetic metaphor; to which must be added, finally, that 
since the idea is represented as substantial, both it and the individuals which participate 
in it must be modeled after a common prototype, e. g., individual men and the idea of man 
(the αὐτοάνθρωπος) after a third man (τρίτος ἄνθρωπος, Met., 1. 9; VII. 13; ef. De Soph. El, 
c. 22). The result of Aristotle’s critique of the Platonic theory of ideas is, however, not 
merely negative. Aristotle is not, for example (as used often to be assumed), the author 
of the doctrine called Nominalism in the Middle Ages, the doctrine which explains the 
concept as a mere subjective product, and the universal as merely a subjective community 
in representation and grammatical designation. Aristotle admits that the subjective con- 
cept is related to an objective reality, and in this sense he is a Realist; but in place of the 
transcendent existence, which Plato ascribed to the ideas in contradistinction to individual 
objects, he teaches the immanence of the essence or the noumenon in the phenomenon. 
Accordingly he says (Met, XIII. 9, 1086b, 2-7): Socrates, through his efforts to determine 
the concepts of things (to define them), led to the creation of the theory of ideas; but he 


“did not separate the universal from the individuals included under it, and in this he was 


right; for without the universal, knowledge is impossible; it is only its isolation apart 
from the world of real things, that is the cause of the incongruities which attach to the 
theory of ideas. (Cf. Anal. Post., 1.11: εἴδη μὲν οὖν εἶναι ἢ ἔν τι παρὰ τὰ πολλὰ οὐκ ἀνάγκη, 
εἰ ἀπόδειξις ἔσται εἶναι μέντοι ἔν κατὰ πολλῶν ἀληϑὲς εἰπεῖν ἀνάγκη. De Anima, III. 4: 
ἐν τοῖς ἔχουσιν ὕλην δυνάμει ἕκαστόν ἐστι τῶν νοητῶν. Tbid., 111. 8: ἐν τοῖς εἴδεσι τοῖς αἰσ- 
ϑητοῖς τὰ νοητά ἐστιν) More negative is the critique which Aristotle directs against the 
reduction of the ideas to (ideal) numbers, and against the derivation of them from certain 
elements (στοιχεῖα, Met., XIV. 1); in the efforts to effect this he finds very much that is 
arbitrary and preposterous: qualitative differences are construed as resulting from quanti- 
tative differences, and that which can only be a function or state (πάθος) of another thing, 
is made the principle or an element of the latter; thus the quantitative is confounded 
with the qualitative, and the accidental with the substantial, in a manner which leads to 
numerous contradictions. 

The opinion of Aristotle, that the individual alone has substantial existence (as οὐσία), 
the universal being immanent (évvrapyor) in it, seems, when taken in conjunction with the 
doctrine that (conceptual or scientific) knowledge is of the οὐσία and, more particularly, that 
definition is a form of cognition of the οὐσία (οὐσίας γνωρισμός), to involve the consequence 
that the individual is the proper object of knowledge, while in fact Aristotle teaches that 
not the individual as such, but rather the universal and ultimate, is in logical strictness the 
object of science. This apparent contradiction is removed, if we bear in mind the distinc- 
tion between the different meanings of οὐσία, viz.: ‘‘the individual substance,” and ‘the 
essential.” Substance, οὐσία, in the sense of the essential, is termed by Aristotle (Metaph., 


ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS. 161 


I. 3 et al.), ἡ κατὰ τὸν λόγον οὐσία, 7. 6., the essence which corresponds with and is cog- 
nized through the concept; but οὐσία in the sense of the individual substance is defined 
(Metaph., V. 8; XIV.5 et al.) as that which can not be predicated of any thing else, but of 
which any thing else may be predicated (namely, as its accident), or as that which exists 
independently and separately (χωριστόν). In Categ., 5, individual things are called “ first 
substances ” (πρῶται οὐσίαι), and species, ‘‘ second substances” (δεύτεραι οὐσίαι). In Met., 
VIII. 2, Aristotle distinguishes in the sphere of οὐσία αἰσθητή (sensible being): 1) matter 
(vA7), 2) form (μορφή), 3) the product of both (ἡ ἐκ τούτων, the individual thing itself as a 
whole). The individual substance (the τόδε τὸ is the whole (σύνολον) resulting from the 
union of the material substratum (ὑποκείμενον, ὕλη) with the ideal essence or form; it is 
the subject of mere states (πάθη) and relations (πρός τι), that are distinguished according 
to the nine categories which, together with οὐσία (individual substance), make up the 
system of ten categories. The more immediate subject of scientific inquiry is, indeed, the 


individual, but its ultimate and more appropriate subject is the universal in the sense of 


the essential. It is true that, according to Aristotelian principles, if the universal is the 
proper object of knowledge, it can only be such because it possesses reality in a higher 
sense than the individual; but such reality does belong to it, since it constitutes the 
essential in all individual substances. If the universal exists only in the individual, it 
follows, indeed, that the former can not be known without the latter, and that this was 
Aristotle’s belief is confirmed by the importance which he concedes to experience and 
induction in his theory of cognition and in his actual investigations in all departments 
of inquiry; but it does not follow that the individual, considered on the side of its 
individuality, must be the object of knowledge, for it can very well be this in view 
simply of the universal, which is immanent in it. Knowledge is concerned pre-eminently 
with the ideal essence (κατὰ τὸν λόγον οὐσία or τί ἦν εἶναι) of individual substances (τῶν 
οὐσιῶν, Metaph., VII. 4, 1030 Ὁ, 5). In the case of the highest, z.e. the divine and imma- 
terial sphere of being, however, this difference between the universal and the individual, 
according to Aristotle, does not exist. 

The expression τὸ τέ ἦν εἶναι, is with Aristotle the general formula for expressions of 
the following kind: τῷ ἀγαθῷ εἶναι, τὸ ἑνὶ εἶναι, τὸ ἀνθρώπῳ εἶναι, so that the τί ἦν is to 
be considered as used substantively in the Dative. The use of εἶναι in thee expressions, 
gives to them the force of abstract nouns, 6. g., τὸ ἀγαθὸν, the Good, τὸ ἀγαθῷ εἶναι, the 
being good, goodness. (Similarly in the formula: ἐστὲ μὲν ταὐτό, τὸ δὲ εἶναι οὐ ταὐτό 
[e. g-, Hth. Nic., V. 3 fin.], i. ὁ.. ‘the object is the same, but the ideal essence is not the 
same.” So De Anima, III. 7: καὶ οὐχ ἕτερον τὸ ὀρεκτικὸν καὶ φευκτικὸν οὔτ᾽ ἀλλήλων οὔτε 
τοῦ αἰσθητικοῦ ἀλλὰ τὸ εἶναι ἀλλο). The Dative here is apparently the Dative of posses- 
sion. The question τὶ ἐστι, “what is it?” can be answered by ἀγαθόν, ἔν, ἄνθρωπος, 
“good,” ‘‘one,” “man,” or by any other concrete term (although Aristotle uses that 
interrogative formula in so comprehensive a signification, that it can also receive an 
abstract answer); then τί ἐστι is made to stand for the answer itself, and is hence em- 
ployed as a general expression for ἀγαθόν, év, avOpwroc, and the like concrete terms. Now, 
as a general formula to represent combinations of single Datives with εἶναι, we might, 
perhaps, expect to find the expression τὸ τί ἐστι εἶναι: but since the putting of the ques- 
tion is to be conceived as already past, Aristotle chose the Imperfect ἦν. (Another 
explanation of this Imperfect attributes to it an objective signification, as denoting the 
originally, eternally existent, the prius of individual existence; but this Platonizing ex- 
planation can not be admitted, because the abstract, which finds its expression in εἶναι, 
ought then, according to this view, to precede the concrete, while here priority is in 
the expression τί ἦν, ascribed, if to either, to the concrete.) Τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι denotes, accord- 

11 


162 ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS. 


ingly, the essence conceived as separate from its substrate, or, as Aristotle defines it 
(Met., VII. 7, p. 1032 Ὁ, 14), οὐσίαν ἄνευ ὕλης. The form of thought which corresponds with 
and may be said to express the τί ἦν εἶναι, is the Concept, λόγος (Eth. N., Il. 6: τὸν λόγον 
τί ἦν εἷναι λέγοντα), whose content is given in the Definition (ὁ ὁρισμός͵ Top., VII. 5; 
Metaph., V. 8). 

Of the four principles: matter (ἡ ὕλη), form (τὸ εἶδος), moving cause (τὸ ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις), 
and end or final cause (τὸ ov évexa), the three latter, according to Phys., II. 7, are often one 
and the same in fact; for essence (form) and end are in themselves identical, since the 
proximate end of every object consists in the full development of its proper form (7. ¢., the 
immanent end of every object, by the recognition of which the Aristotelian doctrine of 
finality is radically distinguished from the superficial utilitarian Teleology of later philoso- 
phers), and the cause of motion is at least identical in kind with the essence and the end; 
for, says Aristotle, man is begotten by man, and in general one fully developed organism 
begets another of the same species, so that though the causa eficiens is not the form itself, 
which is yet to be produced, yet it is a form of similar nature. In the organic creation, 
the soul is the unity of those three principles (De An., II. p. 415 Ὁ, 9: ὁμοίως δ᾽ ἡ ψυχὴ 
κατὰ τοὺς διωρισμένους τρόπους τρεῖς αἰτία: καὶ yap ὅϑεν ἡ κίνησις αὐτῇ καὶ ov ἕνεκα καὶ 
ὡς οὐσία τῶν ἐμψύγων σωμάτων ἡ ψυχή αἰτία). In the case of products, whose causes are 
external to the products themselves (Mechanism), as, for example, in the construction of a 
house, the three causes which stand opposed to matter are distinguished from each other 
not only in conception, but in reality. Examined in their relation to the phenomena of 
generation and growth, matter and form are opposed to each other as potentiality (δύναμις), 
and actuality (or, as Aristotle terms it, ‘“entelechy,” ἐντελεχέια). Of entelechy in general, 
Aristotle distinguishes two species: “ first entelechy,” by which the state of being com- 
plete or finished is to be understood, and “energy,” which denotes the real activity of 
that which is thus complete; yet in practice he does not bind himself strictly to the 
observance of this distinction (cf. Trendelenburg, ad De Anima, p. 296 seq., and Schwegler, 
Met., Vol. 1V., p. 221 seq.). Motion or development is the actualization of the possible, gud 
possible (ἡ τοῦ δυνατοῦ, ἢ δυνατόν ἐντελέχεια. . . κίνησις ἐστιν͵ Phys., 111. 1). Especially 
worthy of notice is the relativity, which Aristotle attributes to these notions, when he em- 
ploys them in concrete cases: the same thing, he says, can be in one respect matter and 
potentiality, in another, form and actuality, e. g., the hewn stone can be the former in rela- 
tion to the house, the latter in comparison with the unhewn stone, the sensuous side of 
the soul (or ψυχῇ) can be the former in comparison with the intelligent mind (νοῦς), the 
latter when compared with the body. Thus the apparent dualism of matter and form 
tends at least to disappear in the reduction of the world to a gradation of existences. 

The very highest place in the scale of being is occupied by the immaterial spirit, called 
God. The proof of the necessity of assuming such a principle is derived by Aristotle 
from the development in nature of objects whose form and structure indicate design, and is 
founded on Aristotle’s general principle, that all transition (κίνησις) from the potential to 
the actual depends on an actual cause. (Met., ΤΧ. 8: Potentiality is always preceded in time 
by some form of actuality, ἀεὶ yap ἐκ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος γίγνεται τὸ ἐνεργείᾳ bv ὑπὸ ἐνεργεία 
ὄντος. De Gen. Animal. 11. 1: ὅσα φύσει γίγνεται ἢ τέχνῃ, ὑπ’ ἐνεργείᾳ ὄντος γίγνεται ἐκ τοῦ 
δυνάμει ὄντος.) Every particular object which is the result of development, implies an actual 
moving cause; so the world as a whole demands an absolutely first mover to give form to 
the naturally passive matter which constitutes it. This principle, the first mover (πρῶτον 
κινοῦν) must (according to Met., XII. 6 seq.) be one, whose essence is pure. energy. since, if it 
were in any respect merely potential, it could not unceasingly communicate motion to all 


things; it must be eternal, pure, immaterial form, since otherwise it would be burdened 
a 


| 


ARISTOTLE’S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 163 


with potentiality (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι οὐκ ἔχει ὕλην τὸ πρῶτον ἐντελέχεια yap). Being free from 
matter, it is without plurality and without parts. It is absolute spirit (νοῦς), which thinks 
:tself, aud whose thought is therefore the thought of thought (νόησις νοήσεως). Its agency as 
the cause of motion is not active and formative, but passive, for it remains itself unmoved ; 
it acts by virtue of the attraction which the loved exerts upon the loving, for it is the Good 
per se and the end toward which all things tend (kivei ov κινούμενον"... κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον). 
Not at any given time did God shape the orderly world; he conditions and determines the 
order of the world eternally, in that he exists as the most perfect being, and all things else 
seek to become like him; the world as an articulate whole has always existed and will 
never perish. As being an “actual” principle, God is not a final product of development ; 
he is the eternal prius of all development. Thought, which is the mode of his activity, con- 
stitutes the highest, best, and most blessed life (Metaph., XII. 7: ἡ ϑεωρία τὸ ἥδιστον Kai 
ἄριστον"... Kai ζωὴ δέ ye ἐνυπάρχει" ἡ yap νοῦ ἐνέργεια ζωή"... ὥστε ζωὴ καὶ αἰὼν συνεχὴς 
καὶ ἀΐδιος ὑπάρχει τῷ ϑεῷ). The world has its principle in God, and this principle exists not 
merely as a form immanent in the world, like the order in an army, but also as an absolute 
self-existent substance, like the general in an army. Aristotle concludes his theology (Met., 
XII. 10 fin.) and marks his opposition to the (Speusippic) doctrine of a plurality of inde- 
pendent and co-existent principles, by citing the following line from Homer (JZlias, II. 204): 


Οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη " εὶς κοίρανος ἔστω. 


In essential agreement with this scientific justification of the belief in God’s existence, 
though differing from it in form, was the substance of the popular reflections contained in 
the third book of the dialogue “Concerning Philosophy.” Cicero (De Nat. Deorwm, 11. 
37, 95) has preserved from it a paragraph of some length, translated into Latin, and it may 
here be cited entire, as furnishing also a specimen of the style of Aristotle in his popular 
(exoteric) writings (to which is to be referred Cicero’s praise in Acad. Pr., II, 119: flumen 
orationis aureum fundens Aristoteles ; cf. Cic., De Orat., 1. 49, Top., 1, De Invent., II. 2, Brut., 
31, Ad Att, II. 1,1, De Fin., 1. 5,14; Dionys. Halic., De Verborum Copia, 241, p. 187 of 
Reiske’s edition, and De Censwra Vet. Script., 4, p. 430): “Imagine men who have always 
dwelt beneath the earth in good and well-illuminated habitations, habitations adorned with 
statues and paintings and well furnished with every thing which is usually at the com- 
mand of those who are deemed fortunate. Suppose these men never to have come up to 
the surface of the earth, but to have gathered from an obscure legend that a Deity and 
divine powers exist. If the earth were once to be opened for these men, so that they 
could ascend out of their concealed abodes to the regions inhabited by us, and if they 
were to step forth and suddenly see before them the earth and the sea and skies, and 
perceive the masses of the clouds and the violence of the winds; and if then they were 
to look up at the sun and become cognizant of its magnitude and also of its workings, that 
he is the author of day, in that he sheds his light over the entire heavens; and if after- 
ward, when night had overshadowed the earth, they were to see the whole sky beset and 
adorned with stars, and should contemplate the changing light of the moon in its increase 
and decrease, the rising and setting of all these heavenly bodies, and their course to all 
eternity inviolable and unalterable: truly, they would then believe that Gods really exist, 
and that these mighty works originate with them.” 


§ 49. Nature is the complex of objects having a material constitu- 
tion and involved in necessary motion or change. Change (μεταβολή) 
or motion (κίνησις), in the broader sense, includes, on the one hand, 


164 ARISTOTLE’S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 


origin and decay (or motion from the relatively non-existent to the 
existent, and conversely); and, on the other, motion in the narrower 
sense, which again is divisible into three species: quantitative mo- 
tion, qualitative motion, and motion in space; or increase and de- 
crease, qualitative transformation, and change of place; the latter 
accompanies all other species of motion. The universal conditions 
of all change of place and of all motion, of whatever kind, are place 
and time. Place (τόπος) is defined as the inner limit of the inclosing 
body. Time is the measure (or number) of motion with reference to 
the earlier and later. No place is empty. Space is limited; the 
world possesses only a finite extension; outside of it is no place. 
Time is unlimited; the world was always, and always will be. The 
primum motum is heaven. The sphere, to which the fixed stars 
are attached, has, since it is in immediate contact with the Deity, the 
best of all possible motions, namely, the motion of uniform circular 
rotation. Aristotle seeks to explain the movements of the planets by 
the theory of numerous spheres moved, in various senses, by unmoved, 
immaterial beings, who are, as it were, a sort of inferior gods. The 
earth, which is spherical, reposes unmoved at the center of the world, 
The five material elements—ether, fire, air, water, and earth—occupy 
in the universe determinate places, suited to their natures. The ether 
fills the celestial spaces, and of it the spheres and the stars are formed. 
The other elements belong to the terrestrial world; they are distin- 
guished from each other by their relative heaviness or lightness, and 
also by their relative warmth or coldness and dryness or moisture ; 
they are commingled in all terrestrial bodies. Nature, guided by the 
principle of finality and proceeding by the way of an ever-increasing 
subjection of matter to form, produces on the earth a scale of living 
beings. Each superior degree in this scale unites in itself the charac- 
ters of the inferior degrees, adding to them its own peculiar and more 
excellent virtue. The vital force, or the soul, in the widest sense of 
this word, is the entelechy of the body. The vital force of the plant 
is nothing more than a constructing force; the animal possesses this, 
and the faculties of sensation, desire, and locomotion besides; man 
combines with all these the faculty of reason. Reason is partly 
passive, subject to determining influences and of temporary duration, 
partly active, determining, and immortal. 

Alewandri Aphrodisiensis Quaestionum Naturalium et Moraliwm ad Aristotelis philosophiam illus- 


trandam libri quatuor, ex recens. Leonh. Spengel, Munich, 1842. 
The content of the writings of Aristotle on natural science is treated of by George Henry Lewes in his 


" 


ARISTOTLE’S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 165 


Aristotle, a Chapter from the History of Science, London, 1864, German translation by J. V. Carns, Leips, 
1865; cf. J. B. Meyer’s account of the book in the Gétt. gel. Anz., 1865, pp. 1445-1474. 

On the character of the Aristotelian Physics in general, οἵ, C. M. Zevort (Paris, 1846), Barthélemy St. 
Hilaire (in the Introd. to his edit. of the Phys., Paris, 1862), Ch. Lévéque (La Physique α᾽ Aristote εἰ la 
Seience Contemporaine, Paris, 1863). On Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of the world, see the article 
by Hi. Siebeck, Zeitschrift fiir exacte Philosophie, IX. 1869, pp. 1-33 and 131-154. 

On the Arist. doctrine of space and time: G. Τὰ, Wolter (Bonn, 1848), and Otto Ule, on Aristotle's 
and Kant’s doctrines of space (Halle, 1850); on the doctrine of time alone (Phys., A. 10 seq.): Ad. Torstrik, 
Philologus, vol. 26, 1868, pp. 446-523 ; on the doctrine of continuity: G. Schilling (Giessen, 1840). 

On the mathematical knowledge of Arist.: A. Burja (in Jém. de ΓΑ σας. de Berlin, 1790-91); on his 
mechanical problems: F. Th. Poselger (in δῆ. der Berl. Akad., 1829), Ruelle (Etude sur um passage 
εἰ Aristote relatif ἃ la méchanique, in the Revue Archéol., 1857, XIV., pp. 7-21); on his meteorology : J. 
L. Ideler (Berlin, 1882), and Suhle (G.-Pr., Bernb. 1864); on his theory of light: E. F. Eberhard (Coburg, 
1836), and Prantl (Arist. tiber die Farben erldutert durch eine Uebersicht tiber die Farbenlehre der 
Alten, Munich, 1849); on his geography: B. L. Konigsmann (Schleswig, 1803-1806). 

On the botany of Aristotle: Henschel (Breslau, 1824), F. Wimmer (Piytologiae Arist. Fragm., Breslau, 
1838), Jessen (Ueber des Arist. Phlanzenwerke, in the Rh. Mus., new series, XIV., 1859, pp. 88-101). On 
the Zoology of A., cf., besides the annotations of J. G. Schneider in his edition of the Historia Animaliwm. 
(Leips. 1811), the works of A. F. A. Wiegmann ( Odserw. zoologicae criticae in Arist. historiam animaliwn, 
Berlin, 1826), Karl Zell (Ueber den Sinn des Geschmacks, in: Ferienschriften, 3. Sammlung, Freiburg, 
1833), Joh. Miller (Ueber den glatten Hai des Arist., Akad., Berlin, 1842), Jirgen Bona Meyer (De prin- 
cipiis Arist. in distribut, animalium adhibitis, Berlin, 1854; Arist. Thierkunde, Berlin, 1855), Sonnen- 
burg (Zu Aristot. Thiergeschichte, G.-Pr., Bonn, 1857), C. J. Sundeval (Die Thierarten des <Aristot., 
Stockholm, 1863), Langkavel (Zu De Part. An., G.-Pr., Berlin, 1863), Aubert (Die Cephalopoden des 
Arist. in zoologischer, anatomischer und geschichtlicher Beziehung, in the Zeitschr. f. wiss. Zoologie, 
XIL., Leips. 1862, p. 372 seq. ; ef. the edition with translation and notes of Aristotle’s work on the Genera- 
tion and Development of Animals, by H. Aubert and Fr. Wimmer, Leipsic, 1860), Henri Philibert (Le 
Principe dela Vie suivant Aristote, Chaumont, 1865; Arist. philosophia zoologica, thesis Parisiensis, 
Chaumont and Paris, 1865), Charles Thurot (Odservations critiques sur le traité d’ Arist. De Purtibus 
Animalium, in the Revue Crit., new series, 1867, pp. 223-242). The two following authors treat specially 
of Aristotle’s doctrines of human anatomy and physiology: Andr. Westphal (De anatomia Aristotelis, 
imprimis num cadavera secuerit humana, Greifswald, 1745), and L. M. Philippson (ὕλη ἀνθρωπίνη, 
pars I.: de internarum humani corporis partium cognitione Aristotelis cum Platonis sententiis com- 
parata; pars 17. : philosophorum veterum usque ad Theophrastum doctrina de sensu, Berlin, 1831). 
Of Aristotle’s physicgnomics treat E. Taube (@.-Pr., Gleiwitz, 1866), and J. Henrychowski (Diss. Inaug., 
Breslau, 1868). 

The following authors treat of the Psychology of Aristotle: Joh. Heinr. Deinhardt (Der Begriff der 
Seela mit Riicksicht auf Aristoteles, Hamburg, 1840), Gust. Hartenstein (De psychol, vulg. orig. ab 
Aristotele repetenda, Leipsic, 1840), Car, Phil. Fischer (De principiis Aristotelicae de anima doctri- 
nae diss., Evlangen, 1845), B. St. Hilaire (in his edition of the De Anima, Paris, 1846), Wilh. Schrader 
(Arist. de voluntate doctrina, Progr. des Brandenb. Gymn., Brandenburg, 1847, and Die Unster- 
blichkeitslehre des Aristoteles, in N. Jahrb. 7. Philol. u. Pdd., Vol. 81, 1860, pp. 89-104), W. Wolff 
(Von dem Begriff des Arist. tiber die Seele und dessen Anwendung auf die heutige Psychologie, Progr., 
Bayreuth, 1845), Gsell-Fels (Psychol. Plat. et Arist., Progr., Wurzburg, 1854), Hugo Anton (Doctrina 
de nat. hom. ab Arist. in scriptis ethicis proposita, Berlin, 1852, and De hominis habitu naturali 
quam Arist. in Eth. Nie. proposuerit doctrinam, Erfurt, 1860), W. F. Volkmann (Die Grundziige 
der Aristotelischen Psychologie, Prague, 1858), Herm. Beck (Arist. de senswum actione, Berlin, 156 ), 
Pansch (De Aristotelis animae definitione diss., Greifswald, 1861), Wilh. Biehl (Die Arist. Definit. 
der Seele, in Verh. der Augsburger Philologen- Vers. for the year 1862, Leipsic, 1863, pp. 94-102). J- 
Freudenthal (Ueber den Begriff des Wortes φαντασία bet Arist., Gottingen, 1863), A. Gratacap (Arist. 
de sensibus doctrina, diss. ph., Montpellier, 1866), Leonh. Schneider (Die Unterblichkeitslehre des 
Aristoteles, Passau, 1867), Eugen Eberhard (Die Arist. Definition der Seele und ihr Werth fiir die 
Gegenwart, Berlin, 1868), [George Grote, in the Supplement to the third edition of Bain’s Senses and the 
Intellect, London, 1869.—Tr.] 

Aristotle’s doctrine of the νοῦς is discussed in works by F. G. Starke (Neu-Ruppin, 1838), F. H. Chr. 
Ribbentrop (Breslau, 1840). Jul. Wolf (Arist. de intellectu agente et patiente doctrina, Berlin, 1844), and 
others, and, recently, by Wilh. Biel (@ymn.-Pr., Linz, 1864), and Franz Brentano (Die Psychologie des 
Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom νοῦς ποιητικός, nebst einer Beilage tiber das Wirken des 
Arist. Gottes, Mayence, 1867). Cf., also, Prantl, Gesch. ἃ. Log., I. p. 108 seq., and F. F. Kampe, Die 
frkenninisslehre des A., Leipsic, 1870, pp. 3-60. 


‘166 ARISTOTLE’S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 


Aristotle designates (Phys., 11. 1) as the universal character of all which is by nature, 
that it has in itself the principle of motion and rest, while in the products of human art 
there is no tendency to change. All natural existences (De Coelo, I. 1) are either them- 
selves bodies, or have bodies or are principles of things having bodies (6. g., body; man; 
soul). The word motion (κίνησις) is sometimes used by Aristotle (6. g., Phys., III. 1) as 
synonymous with change (μεταβολή); but, on the other hand, he says (Phys., V. 1), that 
though all motion is change, yet the converse is not true, all change is not motion, such 
changes, namely, as affect the existence of objects, 7. e., generation and decease (γενέσις and 
φθορά) are not motions. Motion proper exists in the three categories of quantity (κατὰ τὸ 
ποσόν or κατὰ μέγεθος), quality (κατὰ τὸ ποιόν or κατὰ πάθος), and place (κατὰ τὸ ποῦ or κατὰ 
τόπον): in the first case it is increase and decrease (αὐξησις καὶ φθίσις); in the second, 
alteration (ἀλλοίωσις); in the third, change of place (φορά). Aristotle defines τόπος" (Phys., 
IV. 4, p. 212 a, 20), as the first and unmoved boundary of the inclosing body on the side 
of the inclosed (τὸ τοῦ περιέχοντος πέρας ἀκίνητον πρῶτον). Τόπος may be compared to an 
unmoved vessel, containing the object whose τόπος it is. Aristotle understands, therefore, 
by τόπος, not so much the space through which a body is extended, as, rather, the limit by 
which it is bounded, and this conceived as fixed and immovable; his chief argument for 
the non-existence of an unfilled τόπος and for the non-existence of a τόπος outside of the 
world, is founded on the above definition, in accordance with which no yoid within or 
region without the world is possible. All motion must, according to Aristotle, take place 
in a plenwm by means of an exchange of places (ἀντιπερίστασις). The motion of the world, 
as a whole, is not an advancing, but simply a rotary motion. The definition of time [re- 
cited above] is worded as follows (Phys., IV. 11, pp. 219}, 1, 230 ἃ, 24): ὁ χρόνος ἀριθμὸς 
ἐστι κινήσεως κατὰ TO πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον. For the measure of time the uniform circular 
motion is especially appropriate, since it is most easily numbered. Hence time is repre- 
sented (ch. 14) as connected with the motion of the celestial spheres, since by these al! 
other motions are measured. But time is (ch. 11, p. 219b, 8) the number which is reck- 
oned, not that by means of which we reckon. Without a reckoning soul there would be 
no number, hence no time, but only motion, and in it an earlier and later. 

All motion in nature is directed to an end. ‘God and nature do nothing in vain” (ὁ θεὸς 
καὶ ἡ φύσις οὐδὲν μάτην ποιοῦσιν, De Coelo, I. 4). Nevertheless, a certain room is left by 
Aristotle (Phys., 11. 4-6) for the play of the accidental (αὐτόματον) or the advent of results, 
which were not intended, in consequence of some secondary effect following from the 
means used to bring about another end; under the αὐτόματον falls, as a concept of nar- 
rower extension, chance (ἡ τύχη), the emergence of a result which was not (consciously) 
intended, but which might have been intended (6. g., the finding of a treasure while 
plowing the ground). Nature does not always attain her ends, on account of the obstacles 
offered by matter. The degree of perfection in things varies according as they are more or 
less removed from the direct influence of God (cf. § 48). God acts directly on the firmament 
of the fixed stars, which he touches, without being touched by it. (The notion of contact 
(497), which Aristotle (Phys., V. 3) defines as the juxtaposition of ἄκρα or (De Gen. et Corr., 


* [Τόπος is the Greek word for space. It signifies, properly, however, rather place than space, and this 
is the signification which it has with Aristotle. Aristotle’s conception of space is not that of indefinite 
extension. He disallows the idea of unfilled space, and as nothing can occupy space but the world, and as 
the world is, in Aristotle’s view, a bounded sphere, it follows that space in general must be the “ place’ 
occupied by the world, and that its limits are the limits of the world. Aristotle remarks, however, that not 
the world, but only its parts, are in space—which follows from his definition. The place of any thing, he 
defines, is the inner surface of the body surrounding it. that surface being conceived as fixed and immova- 
ble. As nothing exists outside of the world. except God, who is pure thought and not in space, the world 
naturally can not te in space, ἡ. ¢., its “place” can not be defined.—7?.] 


ARISTOTLE’S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 167 


I. 6) ἔσχατα, is here intermediate in signification between contiguity in space and ideal 
affection.) God moves the world from its circumference. The motion of the heaven of 
the fixed stars is better than that of the planetary spheres; the obliquity of the ecliptic 
marks an imperfection of the lower regions; less perfect still are the motions which are 
accomplished on the earth. Each motion of a surrounding sphere is communicated to the 
spheres included in it, so, in particular, that of the sphere of the fixed stars to all the rest; 
when this effect ought not to be produced, as in fact it is not by the planetary spheres on 
those still inferior, retroacting spheres, or spheres with a counter-motion, are requisite. 
The whole number of spheres assumed by Aristotle is 47, or according to another con- 
struction, 55 (Mef., XII. 8). 

The nature of the Ether (which extends from the heaven of the fixed stars down 
to the moon, Meteor., I. 3) adapts it especially for circular motion; to the other elements, 
the upward motion (i.e, from the center of the world toward its circumference) or 
the downward (i. e., from the circumference to the center) is natural. Of these other 
elements, earth is the one to which the attribute of heaviness belongs, and its natural 
place in the world is, consequently, the lowest, viz.: the center of the world; fire is the 
light element, and its place is the sphere next adjoining the sphere of the ether. Fire 
is warm and dry, air is warm and moist (fluid), water is cold and moist (fluid), and 
earth is cold and dry. Ether is the first element in rank (Meteor, 1.3; De Coelo, I. 3; 
ef. De Gen. An., 11. 3); but if we enumerate, beginning with the elements directly 
known by the senses, it is the fifth, the subsequently so-called πέμπτον στοιχεῖον, quinta 
essentia. 

In all organic creations, even in the lowest animals, Aristotle (De Part. An., I. 5) finds 
something admirable, full of purpose, beautiful and divine. The plants are less perfect 
than the animals (Phys., II. 8); among the latter, those which have blood are more perfect 
than the bloodless, the tame than the wild, ete. (De Gen. An., II.1; Pol, 1.5). The 
lowest organisms may arise by original generation (generatio spontanea sive aequivoca, 7. e., 
by ‘‘ generation” only homonymously so called [ὁμωνύμως], and consisting in evolution from 
the heterogeneous). But in the case of all higher organisms, like is generated by like; in 
those which have attained their full development, the germs of new organisms of the same 
name and species are developed (Metaph., XII. 3: ἑκάστη ἐκ συνωνύμων γίγνεται ἡ οὐσία 
... ἄνθρωπος yap ἄνθρωπον γεννᾷ). In the act of generation Aristotle teaches that the 
form-giving or animating principle proceeds from the male, and the form-receiving or 
material principle from the female. 

The two general classes in which Aristotle includes all animals, namely, animals having 
blood and bloodless animals, correspond with what Cuvier termed the Vertebrates and the 
Invertebrates. The latter are classified by Aristotle as either Testacea, Crustacea, Mollusks. 
or Insects; and the former as Fishes, Amphibious Animals, Birds, and Mammalia: the ape 
is viewed by him as an intermediate form between man and other viviparous animals. 
Aristotle founds the division of his anatomical investigations on the distinction of 
ἀνομοιομερῆ, 1. e., organs, whose parts are not like the organs themselves (6. g., the hand; 
the hand does not consist of hands), and ὁμοιομερῆ, 7. e., substances, whose parts are like 
the substances themselves (e. g., flesh, blood; the parts of a piece of flesh or of a mass of 
blood are like the wholes to which they belong). Aristotle had a far more exact knowl- 
edge of the internal organs of animals than of those of the human body. The (physio- 
logical) work on the Senses and the work on the Generation and Development of 
Animals are followed in the ‘History of Animals” by a collection of observations on 
the habits of life, and, in particular, on the psychical functions of the different classes 
of animals, 


108 ARISTOTLE’S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 


Aristotle defines the sowl as the first entelechy of a physical, potentially living and 
organic body (De Antma, 11. 1: ἐστὶν οὖν ψυχὴ ἐντελέχεια ἡ πρώτη σώματος φυσικοῦ ζωὴν 
ἔχοντος δυνάμει" τοιοῦτον δὲ ὃ ἂν ἡ ὀργανικόν). “ First entelechy 7) is related to “second,” 
as knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) to speculation (θεωρεῖν). Neither is mere potentiality; both are 
realized potentialities; but while knowledge may be ours as a passive possession, specula- 
tion is, as it were, knowledge in activity, or knowledge put to its most characteristic use; 
so the soul is not (like the divine mind) always engaged in the active manifestation of its 
own essence, but is always present, as the developed force capable of such manifestation. 
As the entelechy of the body the soul is at once its form (principiwm formams), its prin- 
ciple of motion and its end. Each organ exists (De Part. An., I. 5) in view of an end, and 
this end is an activity; the whole body exists for the soul. The vegetable soul, ἡ. e., the 
vital principle of the plant, is (according to De An., II. 1 et al.) a nourishing soul, τὸ 
θρεπτικόν, the faculty of material assimilation and reproduction. The animal possesses in 
addition to this the sensitive, appetitive and locomotive faculties (τὸ αἰσϑητικόν͵ τὸ ὀρεκτικόν, 
τὸ κινητικὸν κατὰ τόπον). The corporeo-psychical functions of animals (at least of the 
more highly developed animals) have a common center (μεσότης), which is wanting in 
plants; the central organ is the heart, which is viewed by Aristotle as the seat of sensa- 
tion, the brain being an organ of subordinate importance. Sensuous perception (αἴσθησις 
is the result of qualities which exist potentially in the objects perceived and actually in the 
perceiving being. The seeing of colors depends on a certain motion of the medium of 
vision (air or water). With sensuous perception are connected imaginative representation 
(φαντασία), which is a psychical after-effect of sensation (De An., IIT. 3), or a sort of weak- 
ened sensation (Fhet., I. 11, 1370 a, 28), and also (involuntary) memory (μνήμη), which is 
to be explained by the persistence (μονῇ) of the sensible impression (De Memor., ch. 1; Anal. 
Post., 11. 19), and (voluntary) recollection (ἀνάμνησις), which depends on the co-operation 
of the will and implies the power of combining mental representations (De Memor., ch. 2). 
Out of these theoretical functions, combined with the feeling of the agreeable and the 
disagreeable, springs desire (ὄρεξις); whatever, says Aristotle, is capable of sensation, is 
also capable of pleasure and pain and of the feeling of the agreeable and disagreeable, and 
whatever is capable of these, is capable also of desire (De An., 11. 3, p. 414b, 4). The 
human soul, uniting in itself all the faculties of the other orders of animate existence, is a 
Microcosm (De An., III. 8). The faculty by which it is distinguished from those orders is 
reason (νοῦς). The other parts of the soul are inseparable from the body, and are hence 
perishable (De An., II. 2); but the νοῦς exists before the body, into which it enters from 
without as something divine and immortal (De Gen. Animal., II. 3: λείπεται τὸν νοῦν μόνον 
θύραθεν, ἐπεισιέναι καὶ θεῖον εἷναι μόνον). But the concept or notion is impossible without 
the representative image (φάντασμα). This stands to the concept in a relation similar to 
that in which the mathematical figure stands to that which is demonstrated by means of 
it, and only by the aid of such an image, joined with the feeling of the agreeable or dis- 
agreeable, can the reason act upon the appetitive faculty, 7. e., become practical reason 
(De An., III. 10). The νοῦς, therefore, in man, has need of a δύναμες, or what may be called 
an unfilled region of thought, a tabula rasa, before it can manifest its form-giving activity 
(De An., 111. 4: [νοῦς ἐστι] γραμμάτειον, ᾧ μηϑὲν ὑπάρχει ἐνεργείᾳ γεγραμμένον). Accord- 
ingly, a distinction must be made between the passive reason (νοῦς παθητικός), as the form- 
receiving, and the active reason (νοῦς ποιητικός), as the form-giving principle; substantial, 
eternal existence belongs only to the latter (De Anima, III. 5: ὁ νοῦς χωριστὸς καὶ ἀπαϑὴς 
καὶ ἀμιγὴς τῇ οὐσίᾳ ὧν ἐνεργείᾳ... ὁ δὲ παϑητικὸς νοῦς φϑαρτός). How the active reason 
is related, on the one hand, to individual existence, on the other, to God, is not made per- 
fectly clear; a certain lafltude is left for a naturalistic and pantheistic or for a morg 


ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND ASTHETICS. 169 


spiritualistic and theistic interpretation, and each of these interpretations has found 
numerous representatives both in ancient and later times; yet it is scarcely possible to 
develop either of them in all its consequences, without running counter to other portions 
of Aristotle’s teaching. 


§ 50. The end of human activity, or the highest good for man, is 
happiness. This depends on the rational or virtuous activity of the 
soul throughout the whole of its life. With activity pleasure is 
joined, as its blossom and natural culmination. Virtue is a pro- 
ficiency in willing what is conformed to reason, developed from the 
state of a natural potentiality by practical action. The development 
of virtue requires the existence of a faculty of virtue, and requires 
also exercise and intelligence. All virtues are either ethical or 
dianoetic. Ethical virtue is that permanent direction of the will (or 
state of mind), which guards the mean proper for us, as determined 
for us by the reason of the intelligent; hence it is the subordination 
of appetite to reason. Bravery is the mean between cowardice and 
temerity ; temperance, the mean between inordinate desire and stupid 
indifference ; generosity, the mean between prodigality and parsimony, 
etc. The highest among the ethical virtues is justice or righteous- 
ness. This, in the most extended sense of the word, is the union 
of all ethical virtues, so far as they regard our fellow-men; in the 
narrower sense, it respects the equitable (/oov) in matters of gain or 
loss. Justice in this latter sense is either distributive or commuta- 
tive ; the former respects the partition of possessions and honors, the 
latter relates to contracts and the reparation of inflicted wrongs. 
Equity is a complementary rectification of legal justice by reference 
to the individuality of the accused. Dianoetic virtue is the correct 
functioning of the theoretical reason, either in itself or in reference 
to the inferior psychical functions. The dianoetic virtues are reason, 
science, art, and practical intelligence. The highest stage of reason 
and science is wisdom in the absolute sense of the term, the highest 
stage of art is wisdom in the relative sense. A life devoted only to 
sensual enjoyment is brutish, an ethico-political life is human, but a 
scientific life is divine. 

Man has need of man for the attainment of the practical ends of 
life. Only in the state is the ethical problem capable of solution. 
Man is by nature a political being. The state originated for the 
protection of life, but ought to exist for the promotion of morally 
upright living; its principal business is the development of moral 


170 ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND ASTHETICS. 


capacity in the young and in all its citizens. The state is prior to 
the individual in that sense in which in general the whole is prior to 
the part and the end prior to the means. Its basis is the family. 
He who is capable only of obedience and not of intelligence must be 
a servant (slave). The concord of the citizens must be founded on 
unanimity of sentiment, not on an artificial annihilation of individual 
interests. The most practicable form of the state is, in general, a 
government in which monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic ele- 
ments are combined; but in all individual eases this form must be 
accommodated to the given circumstances. Monarchy, Aristocracy, 
and Timocracy (or a Republic) are, under the appropriate cireum- 
stances, good forms of government; Democracy, Oligarchy, and 
Tyranny are degenerate forms, of which the latter, as being the cor- 
ruption of the most excellent form, is the worst. The distinguishing 
mark of good and bad forms of government is found in the object 
pursued by the rulers, according as this object is either the public 
good or the private interest of the rulers. It is right that the 
Hellenes should rule over the barbarians, the cultured over the 
uncultured, 

Art is of two kinds, useful and imitative. The latter serves 
three ends: recreation and (refined) entertainment, temporary eman- 
cipation from the control of certain passions by means of their excita- 
tion and subsequent subsidence, and, last and chiefly, moral culture. 

Of the ethics of Aristotle in general write Chr. Garve ( Uebers. und Erildut., Berlin, 1798-1802), Schleier- 
macher (in various passages.of his Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre, Berlin, 1803; ef. 
Ueber die wiss. Behandlung des Tugendbegriffs, in the Abh. der Acad., Berlin, 1820), K. L. Michelet 
(Die Ethik des Arist. in ihrem Verhiltniss zwm System der Moral, Berlin, 1827; ef. his Syst. der philos. 
Moral, 1828, pp. 195-237), Hartenstein (Ueber den wiss, Werth der Arist. Ethik, in the Berichte iiber die 
Verhandlungen der K. Stichs. Gesellsch. der Wiss, zu Leipzig, philol.-hist. cl., 1859, pp. 49-107, and in 
H.'s Hist.-philos. Abh., Leipsic, 1870), Trendelenburg (Ueber Herbart’s praktische Philos. und die Ethik 
der Alten, in the Abh. der Berl. Akad., 1856; ef. the 10th essay in T.'s Mist. Beitr. zur Philos., Vol. 11. 
Berlin, 1855, Ueber einige Stellen im 5 τι. 6, Buche der Nikomach. Ethik, and the 9th article in Vol. III. 
of the same, Berlin, 1867; Zur Arist. Ethik., pp. 399-444), Dielitz (Quaestiones Aristoteleae, Progr. of the 
Sophien-gymn, Berlin, 1867). 

Of the relation of Aristotle’s ethics and politics to the corresponding doctrines of Plato, and of Aris- 
totle’s critique of the latter, treat Pinzger (Leipsic, 1522), H. W. Broecker (Leipsic, 1824), W. Orges (Berlin, 
1843), St. Matthies (Greifswald, 1848), A. J. Kahlert (Czernowitz, 1854), W. Pierson (in the Rhein. Mus. f. 
Ph., new series, XIII., 1858, pp. 1-48 and 209-247) ; also, Fr. Guil. Engelhardt, Loci Platonici, quorum Aris- 
toteles in conscribendis Politicis videtur memor fuisse, Dantzic, 1858; Siegfr. Lommatzsch, Quomodo 
Plato et Arist. religionis et reip. principia conjunxerint, Berlin, 1863; C. W. Schmidt, Ueber die Hin- 
wirge des Arist. in der Nik. Ethik gegen Plat. Lehre von der Lust (G.-Pr.), Bunzlau, 1864; Kalmus, A7. 
de volupt. doctr. (G.-Pr.), Pyritz, 1862; Rassow, Die Rep. des Plato und der beste Staat des Arist., 
Weimar, 1866, Cf. the dissertations by Gust. Goldmann (Berlin, 1868), and Adolf Ehrlich (Halle, 1868). and 
the opuscule of Herm. Henkel on Plato’s Laws and the Politics of Aristotle (Gym.-Progr.), Seehauser, 
1869. On Kant’s Ethics as compared with Aristotle’s, see Traug. Brickner, De tribus ethices locis, quibru, 


differt Kantius ab Aristotele, diss. inaug., Berlin, 1866, and Trendelenburg, Der Widerstreit zwischen 
Kant und Arist. in der Ethik, in his Histor, Beitrdge zur Philosophie, Vol. 111., 1867, pp. 171-214 


ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND ΦΒΤΗΕΤΙΟΒ. 171 


Ch. E. Luthart, Die Zthik des Arist. in ihrem Unterschied von der Moral des Ohristenthums, Leipsic, 
1869. Wilh Oncken, Die Staatslehre des Arist. in hist.-pol. Umrissen, Leipsic, 1870; Ar. u. 5. L.v. Staat, 
in Virchow and Holtzendorff’s Sammlung gemeinverstandliche wiss. Vortrage, No. 103, Berlin, 1870. 

Of the ethical and political principles of Aristotle treat Starke (Neu-Ruppin, 1838 and 1850), Holm 
(Berlin, 1853), Ueberweg (Das Arist, Kantische und Herbartsche Moral-princip., in Fichte’s Z., Vol. 24, 
Halle, 1854, p. 71 seq.); on the method and the bases of Aristotle's Ethics, cf. Rud. Eucken (G.-Pr., Frank- 
fort-on-the-Main, 1870); on points of contact between the Ethics and Politics, J. Munier (G.-Pr., Mayence, 
1858), Schiitz (Potsd. 1860); on the Highest Good, Kruhl (Breslau, 1832 and 1833), Afzelius (Holmiae, 1835), 
Axel Nyblius (Lund, 1863), Wenkel (Die Lehre des Arist. tiber das hochste Gut oder die Gliick- 
seligkeit, G.-Pr., Sondershausen, 1864); on the Zudaemonia of Arist. Herm. Hampke (De Hudaemonia, 
Arist. moralis disciplinae principio, diss. inaug. Berol., Brandenb. 1858), G. Teichmiiller (Die Hinke®t 
der Ar. Eudiimonie, from the Mélanges graeco-romains, 1., IL, St. Petersburg, 1859, in the Budletin 
hist.-phil., t. XVL., of the Imperial Acad. of Sciences, ibid. 1859), E. Laas (Diss, Brl., 1809), Chr. A. 
Thilo (in the Zeitschrift fiir ewacte Philos., Vol. 11., Leipsic, 1861, pp. 271-309), Karl Knappe (G@rundziige 
der Arist. Lehre von der Euddm., G.-Pr., Wittenberg, 1864-66); on A.’s conception of virtue, Nielander 
(G.-Pr., Herford, 1861); on the theory of Duties, Carl. Aug. Mann (Diss. inaug., Berlin, 1867): on the 
conceptions μεσότης and ὀρθὸς λόγος, G. Glogau (Halle, 1869); on the place of Sensation in Aristotle's 
doctrine, Roth (in Theolog. Studien und Krit., 1850, Vol. L, p. 625 seq.) on Justice, A. G. Kastner 
(Leipsiec, 1737), C. A. v. Droste-Hiilshoff (Bonn, 1826), Herm. Ad. Fechner (Breslawer Diss., Leipsic, 1859), 
Freyschmidt (Die Arist. Lehre von der Gerechtigkeit und das moderne Staatsrecht, G.-Pr., Berlin, 
1867), and Trendelenburg (in the above-cited works); ef. also the articles of H. Hampke (in PAzlol., 
XVI. 1860, pp. 60-84) and F. Hicker (in Miitzell’s Zettschr. fiir das Gymnialwesen, Berlin, 1862, pp. 513- 
560) on the fifth book of the Vicom. Ethics, which treats of justice ; on the place given to practical prudence 
in A.’s doctrine, Lidke (Stralsund, 1862); on the principle of division and arrangement followed in the 
classification of moral virtues in the Nic. Eth., F. Hicker (Progr. des Colm. Real.-Gymm., Berlin, 1863, and 
in Miittzell’s Zeitschr. fiir G.- W.. XVIL., Berlin, 1863, pp. 821-843) ; on the Dianoetic Virtues, Prantl (Munich, 
1852), and A. Kiihn (Berlin, 1860); on Imputation, according to Aristotle, Afzelius (Upsalae, 1841); on 
Friendship, Breier (De aniic. principum, ad Ar. Eth, Nic., 1158 a, G.-Pr., Lubeck, 1858) ; on Slavery, War: 
Krug (Leips. 1813), C. Géttling (Jena, 1821), Ludw. Schiller (Erlangen, 1847), 8. L. Steinheim (Hamburg, 
1853), and Wilh. Uhde (Diss. inaug., Berlin, 1856); on the Arist. conception of Politics, Jul. Findeisen 
(Diss, inaug., Berlin, 1863); on Aristotle’s Classification of Forms of Government, G. Teichmiiler (Progr. 
of the School of St. Ann at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg and Berlin, 1859); on Aristotle’s Theory of the 
State, J. Bendixen (Progr. der Pliner Gelehrtenschule, Hamburg, 1868); on the economic doctrines in the 
* Politics” of Aristotle, Ludwig Schneider (@ymn.-Progr., Deutsch Crone, 1868). 

Of the Arist. doctrine of poetry and art in general, treat Lessing (in his Hamb. Dramaturgie, Stiick 37 
seq., 46 seq., 74 seq.), Ed. Miller (6. d. Th. d. Kunst. ὃ. d. A., ΤΙ. pp. 1-183, 346-395, and 417), Wilh. Schrader 
(De artis apud Arist. notione ac vi, Berlin, 1843), Franz Susemihl ( Vortrag, Griefsw. 1862), Th. Strater (in 
Fichte’s Z. f. Ph., new series, Vol. XL., pp. 219-247; Vol. ΧΙ]. pp. 204-223, 1862); of the conception of 
imitation, E. Miller (in the volume above cited, pp. 1-23 and 346-361; also, in Die Jdee der Aesthetik in 
ihrem historischen Ursprung, Ratibor, 1840), and W. Abeken (G6tt. 1836); of A.’s Poetics and modern 
dramatists, F. vy. Raumer (read in the Berlin Acad. αι. Wiss., 1828); of his doctrine of the tragedy, Lobel 
(Leips. 1786), A. Boeckh (Ges. Kl. Schriften, 1. p. 180 seq., a discourse delivered in 1830), Starke (Neu- 
Ruppin, 1830), G. W. Nitzsch (Kiel, 1846), Heinrich Weil (in Verhandl. der 10 Versammlung deutscher 
Philologen, Basel, 1848, pp. 131-141), Wassmuth (Saarbrucken, 1852), Klein (Bonn, 1856), Jakob Bernays 
(Breslau, 1858, see above, ad § 46, and in the Rh. Mus., new series, XIV. pp. 367-377, and XY. p. 606 seq.), 
Ad, Stahr (Arist u. d. Wirkung der Trag., Berlin, 1859, and notes to his translation of the Poetics, Stutt- 
gart, 1860), Leonh. Spengel (Ueber die κάθαρσις τῶν παθημάτων, Munich, 1859, in Vol. IX. of the Abh. der 
Miinchener Akad. ἃ. Wiss., pp. 1-S0, ef. Rh. Mus., new series, XV. pp. 458-462); of these works and of 
other works by Liepert (Avist. und der Zwece der Kunst, G.-Pr., Passau, 1862), Geyer, and others, a 
critical account is given by F. Ueberweg (in Fichte’s Zeitschr. fiir Philos., Vol. 36, 1860, pp. 260-291; 8 
positive complement to that article is furnished in my article on Die Lehre des A. von dem Wesen und der 
Wirkung der Kunst, ibid., Vol. 50, 1867, pp. 16-39, and in Notes 23 and 25 to my transl. of A.’s Poetics, 
Berlin, 1869), Franz Susemihl (in N. Jahrb. fiir Philol. τι. Pddag., Vol. 85,1862, pp. 395-425, and in his 
edition and transl. of the Poetics), and A. Déring (in P/ilol., XXI., 1864, pp. 496-534, and XXVII., 1868, 
pp. 689-728). Gerh. Zillgenz, Arist. wnd das deutsche Drama, Wirzburg, 1865. Paul Graf York von 
Wartenburg, Die Katharsis des Arist. und der Oedipus Colonus des Sophoktes, Berlin, 1866. Cf. also R. 
Wachsmuth, De Arist. Studiis Homericis, Berlin, 1863, and the contributions to the critique and elucida- 
tion of Arist.s Poetics, by Vahlen, Susemihl, Teichmiiller, and others (see above, p. 143). On Lessing’s 
conception of the Aristotelian doctrine of Tragedy, οἵ, Καὶ. A. F. Sundelin, Upsala, 1868. 

On the Rhetoric of Aristotle in its relation to Plato's Gorgias, cf. H. Anton (in Rh. Ifus. 7. Ph. new 


172 ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS AND ASTHETICS. 


series, Vol. XIV., 1859), and in its relation to Plato’s Phaedrus and Gorgias, Georg Richard Wieclmana 
(Platonis et Arist. de arte rhetorica doctrinae inter sc. comparatae, diss. inaug., Berlin, 1864), and Spen- 
gel (Ueber das Studium der Rhetorik bei den Alten, in the Abhandl. der Miinch. Akad. ἃ. W., 1842, and 
Ueber die Rhetorik des Arist., ibid., 1851; cf. also Spengel, Philol , XVIII. 1862, pp. 604-646 and the litera- 
ture there cited by him, p. 605seq., on the Pseudo-Arist., so-called Rhetorica ad Alewandrum, as the 
author of which, the rhetorician Anaximenes, a contemporary of Arist. is named by Victorius and, in 
modern times, by Spengel), Usener (Quaestiones Anurimeneue, Gitt. 1856), and others. Sal. Kalischer, De 
Arist. Rhetor. et Eth. Nicom. (Diss. inaug.), Halle, 1868. 

On the Aristotelian Theory of Education. cf. J.C. Orelli (in his Phéilol. Beitr. aus d. Schweiz. Zurich, 
1819, I. pp. 61-180), Alex. Kapp (Arist. Staatspddagogik, Hamm, 1837), Fr. Chr. Schulze (Naumburg, 1844), 
Sal. Lefmann (De Arist. in hominwm educatione principiis, Berlin, 1864), Frid. Alb. Janke (Aristoteles 
doctrinae paedagogicae pater, diss. inaug., Halle, 1866). 


In accordance with his general metapliysical doctrines respecting the relation of 
essence to end, Aristotle can determine the essence of morality only by considering what 
is the object or aim of moral activity; the fundamental conception of his Ethics is accord- 
ingly that of the highest good, or rather, since ethics relates to human conduct, of the 
highest practical good attainable by man as an active being (το πάντων ἀκρότατον τῶν 
πρακτῶν ἀγαθῶν. Eth. Nic., 1. 2); it is unnecessary, he observes, for the purposes of ethics, 
to speculate, after the manner of Plato, about the idea of the Good (ibid. I. 4). The aim of 
all moral action, says Aristotle, is admitted on all hands to be happiness or eudaemonia 
(εὐδαιμονία, τὸ εὖ ζῆν or εὖ πράττειν). Eudaemonia results from the performance of the pecu- 
liar work which belongs to man as man (th. Nic., 1. 6; X. 1). The peculiar work of man 
can not consist in merely living, for plants also live, nor in having sensations, for these are 
shared by man with the brute creation; it can only consist in a life of action, under the 
control of reason (ζωὴ πρακτικῇ Tic τοῦ λόγον ἔχοντος). Since now it is in the sphere of the 
characteristic activity of each living being that we are to search for its peculiar excellence, 
it follows that man’s rational activity (ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια κατὰ λόγον), and none other, is at the 
same time honorable and virtuous activity (ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια κατ᾽ ἀρετήν: Eth. Nic., ΤΙ. 5: 
ἡ τοῦ avdparov ἀρετὴ ein ἂν ἕξις ad’ ἧς ἀγαϑὸς ἄνϑρωπος γίνεται καὶ ad’ ἧς εὖ TO ἑαυτοῦ 
ἔργον ἀποδώσει). The greatest happiness is connected with the highest of the virtues 
(Eth. Nic. I. 6; X. 7). Nevertheless, for complete happiness a sufficient provision of ex- 
ternal goods is essential, since these are necessary for the active manifestation of virtue, 
just as the equipping of the chorus is necessary for the representation of a dramatic work 
of art (Eth. Nic., I. 11). 

Pleasure is the complement of activity, it is the end in which activity naturally dis- 
charges itself and comes to rest; pleasure is to activity what beauty is to the perfect 
physical development of youth (Eth. Nic., X. 4: τελειοῖ δὲ τὴν ἐνέργειαν ἡ ἡδονὴ οὐχ ὡς ἡ 
ἕξις ἐνυπάρχουσα, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἐπιγιγνόμενόν τι τέλος, οἷον τοῖς ἀκμαίοις ἡ ὥρα). Pleasure is 
united with Eudaemonia, and exists in the highest degree in connection with that highest 
Eudaemonia, which results from knowledge (Zth. N., X. 7). 

Morality presupposes freedom. This exists whenever the will of the agent meets no 
obstacles and he is able to deliberate intelligently. It is destroyed by ignorance or con- 
straint (Hth. Nic., II., init.). 

The reason must, on the one hand, be obeyed by the lower functions (especially by the 
πάθη, the passions), and, on the other, must rightly develop its own activities; on this 
double requirement is founded the distinction of the two kinds of virtues, the practical or 
ethical and the dianoetic virtues (ἠθικαὶ and διανοητικαὶ or λογικαὶ ἀρεταί, or ab μὲν τοῦ 
ἤθους, at δὲ τῆς διανοίας ἀρεταί). The inclusion of the dianoetic or intellectual in the 
sphere of virtue is explained by the broader signification of the latter term in Greek (as 
equivalent to ability). ‘Héoc [whence the English ethics], which denotes originally the 


ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND ZSTHETICS. 173 


natural bent of man in mind and disposition (temperament), signifies here the moral 
character. 

Aristotle’s [above-cited] definition of ethical virtue (or the virtue of character) is worded 
in the original as follows (Hth. Nic., Il. 6): ἕξις προαιρετικὴ ἐν peodtyte οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς 
ὡρισμένη (the MSS., to judge from the earlier editions, appear to have had opiopévy, and 
that is probably the correct reading, although Bekker retains the Nominative) λόγῳ καὶ ὡς 
av ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν. Virtue is a ἕξεις [usually translated habitus in Latin and habitude in 
English], and the latter is to δύναμες [power, potentiality] as proficiency is to endowment; 
the ethical δύναμις is originally undetermined and may be determined in either of the two 
opposite moral directions; its actual development must take place in a definite direction, 
and the ἕξις then has the corresponding character. (According to the Aristotelian defini- 
tion—from which the subsequent definition of the Stoics deviated—all ée¢ were also 
διαθέσεις, but not all διαθέσεις were ἕξεις, Categ., 8, p. 9a, 10; διάθεσις is defined, Met. V. 
19, as τοῦ ἔχοντος μέρη τάξις, ἢ κατὰ τόπον ἢ κατὰ δύναμιν ἢ Kaz’ εἶδος - the ἕξις is changed 
with difficulty, while those διαθέσεις, which are pre-eminently so-called and are not ἕξεις, 
such as warmth, coldness, disease, health, are easily changeable, according to Categ., ch. 8, 
p. 8b, 35. Cf. Trendelenburg, Gesch. der Kutegorienlehre, p. 95 seq., and Comm. ad De 
Anima, ΤΙ, 5, 5.) The “ἕξις mpoarpetixy,”’ direction of the will or the disposition. The 
function of the reason in connection with the desires, which are prone to err through 
excess or omission (ὑπερβολή and ἔλλειψις), on the side of the too much or the too litile, is to 
determine the right proportion or the mean (μεσότης) ; in this connection Aristotle himself 
(Eth. Nic., 11. 5) recalls the Pythagorean doctrine (which was also adopted by Plato in 
another reference) of limit and the unlimited (πέρας and ἀπειρον). 

In enumerating the particular virtues, Aristotle follows the order of the rank or dignity 
of the functions to which they have reference, advancing from the necessary and useful to 
the beautiful (ef. Pol, VII. 14, p. 1333 a, 30). These functions are 1) physical life, 2) 
sensuous, animal enjoyment, 3) the social life of man in its various relations (possession 
and honor, social community in word and action, and, above all, political community), 4) the 
speculative functions. 

The ethical virtues are courage, temperance, liberality and magnificence, high-minded- 
ness and love of honor, mildness, truthfulness, urbanity and friendship, and justice (Zth. 
Nic., If. 7; ef. the less rigorous exposition in Rhet., I. 9). 

Courage (ἀνδρεία) is a mean between fearing and daring (μεσότης περὶ φόβους καὶ 
θάῤῥη); but not every such mean is courage, at least not courage in the proper sense 
of the term. In the strict sense, he only is courageous who is not afraid of an honorable 
death (ὁ περὶ τὸν καλὸν θάνατον ἀδεῆς, III. 9), and, in general, he only who is ready to 
face danger for the sake of the morally beautiful (καλόν, Eth. Nic., III. 10, p. 1115 Ὁ, 12: 
ὡς δεῖ δὲ καὶ ὡς ὁ Λόγος, ὑπομενεῖ (ὁ ἀνδρεῖος τὰ φοβερὰ) τοῦ καλοῦ ἕνεκα, τοῦτο yap 
τέλος τῆς ἀρετῆς). Genuine courage does not flow from passionateness (θυμός), although 
the latter may co-operate with the former, but from giving to the befitting (which de- 
pends on the moral end) the preference over life. The extremes, between which courage 
is the mean, are represented by the foolhardy man and the coward (Hth, Nic., 11. 7, 
and IIT. 10). 

Temperance (σωφροσύνη) guards the proper mean in respect of pleasures and pains 
(μεσότης περὶ ἡδονὰς καὶ λύπας), but rather in respect of pleasures than of pains; and also 
not in respect of pleasures of every sort, but in respect of the lowest pleasures, which are 
common to man with the animal, those of touch and taste; and yet more particularly, in 
respect of the ‘‘enjoyment which arises wholly through the sense of touch, whether in 
meats, in drinks, or in what are termed venereal pleasures” (ἀπόλαυσις, ἣ γίνεται πᾶσα dé 


174 ARISTOTLE’8 ETHICS AND STHETICS. 


ἁφῆς καὶ ἐν σιτίοις καὶ ἐν ποτοῖς καὶ τοῖς ἀφροδισίοις λεγομένοις, III. 13). The extremes 
are intemperance and insensibility (II. 7, and III. 14). 

Liberality (ἐλευθεριότης) observes the proper mean in giving and receiving (μεσότης περὶ 
δόσιν χρημάτων Kai λῆψιν), especially in giving, and in cases where it is a question of 
comparatively small values (IV. 1); when greater values are involved, the right mean is 
magnificence (μεγαλοπρέπεια, TV. 4) or ‘‘princeliness.” The extremes are prodigality and 
stinginess (II. 7 and IV. 1), and meanness and vulgarity (bad taste, IV. 4). 

The proper mean in matters of honor and dishonor (μεσότης περὶ τιμὴν καὶ ἀτιμίαν), in 
cases of importance, is highmindedness (μεγαλοψυχία, TV. 7); in cases of less consequence, 
ambition (φιλοτιμία), or, more exactly, the correct mean between ambition and indifference 
(ἀφιλοτιμία, TV.10). The high-minded or high-spirited man (μεγαλόψυχος) is he, who, being 
indeed worthy of great things, holds himself to be worthy of them (6 μεγάλων αὑτὸν 
ἀξιῶν ἄξιος ὧν). He who erroneously holds himself to be worthy of great things, especially 
he who incorrectly thinks himself deserving of high honor, is vain (χαῦνος), while he who 
underrates his own worth is mean-spirited (μικρόψυχος). The ambitious (φελότεμος) and the 
unambitious err in regard to the measure and manner in which, the reason for which, and 
the time when honor should be sought. Praiseworthy is only the correct mean, which, in 
opposition to the one or the other extreme, is termed sometimes ambition, sometimes 
indifference. 

Mildness (πραότης) is the proper mean in seeking for revenge (μεσότης περὶ ὀργῆν, II. 1, 
and IV.11). ’Opy7 is the desire of revenge (τιμωρίας ὄρεξις), it is the passion of the θυμός ; 
the θυμός is the potentiality, which may be developed either into ὀργῇ or into πράῦνσις 
(placability; metaphorically, θυμός denotes ὀργῇ itself). Excess in regard to anger is 
irascibility, when the anger quickly rises and goes quickly away (whereas those who are 
πικροί, bitter, in their wrath, cherish it a long time); deficiency in this respect is ἀοργησία. 

Truthfulness (or sincerity), facility in social intercourse, and friendliness (ἀλήθεια, εὐτρα- 
πέλεια and φιλία) are means in the management of one’s words and actions in society 
(μεσότητες περὶ λόγων καὶ πράξεων κοινωνίαν). The first of these three virtues regards 
veracity (the ἀληθές) in discourse and action; the other two end in the agreeable (ἡ δύ), the 
one (εὐτραπέλεια), being in place in social pastimes (ἐν ταῖς παιδιαῖς) and the other (friend- 
ship), in all other social relations (11. 7 and IV. 12-14). The obsequious man praises and 
yields, in order not to render himself disagreeable to his companions, and the flatterer 
(κόλαξ) does the same from motives of self-interest. The fretful and the cross man care 
not, whether their conduct is offensive to others. The right mean of conduct in this 
respect has no particular name. It most resembles friendship, from which, howeyer, it is 
distinguished, in that it is to be followed not merely among acquaintances and friends 
(whom we love), but also, so far as is becoming, in our intercourse with all whom we may 
meet. The candid man holds the mean between the braggart (ἀλαζὼν) and the dissembler 
(cipwv), in that he gives himself out for just what he is, and neither boasts nor belittles 
himself. Those who indulge in well-timed mirth, are witty and elegant; those who carry 
mirthfulness to excess, are buffoons and rude; while those who hate all mirth, appear un- 
cultivated, clownish, and stiff. ‘ 

Supplementari‘y Aristotle treats of certain other “means,” which are not regarded by 
him as properly virtues, and, in particular, of shame (the ἦθος of the αἰδήμων), which he 
considers as only relatively praiseworthy (ἡ αἰδὼς ἐξ ὑποϑέσεως ἐπιεικές), and more becom- 
ing to youth than to riper age (IV. ch. 15). Shame is the fear of ill-repute (φόβος ἀδοξίας) 
and is rather a passive emotion (πάθος) than a developed virtue (é&c¢). The extremes are 
represented by the timid and the shameless. Nemesis, or just indignation, is a mean 
(a μεσότης περὶ Ta πάθη), Whose extremes are envy (φθόνος) and spitefulness (ἐπεχαιρεκακία). 


ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND ΖΦΒΤΗΕΤΙΟΒ. 175 


To justice (δικαιοσύνη) he devotes a minute consideration (Eth. N., eI: Justice in the 
most general sense is the practice of all virtue toward others (τῆς ὅλης ἀρετῆς χρῆσις πρὸς 
ἄλλον, V. 5); it is τ Ῥθεῖθου virtue, yet not absolutely, but with reference to others” 
(ἀρετὴ μὲν τελεία, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ἁπλῶς, ἀλλὰ πρὸς ἕτερον, V. 3). It is the most perfect virtue, 
because it is the perfect exercise of all (perfect) virtue (ὅτε τῆς τελείας ἀρετῆς χρῆσίς ἐστι 
τελεία" τελεία δ' ἐστίν, ete.—for τελεία is to be repeated in this passage, 1129b, 31; cf. 
the similar turn of expression in Cic., Tuscul., 1.45: nemo parum diu vixit, qui steaks 
perfectae perfecto functus est munere), and because he, who possesses it, is able to practice 
virtue as well in regard to others as in regard to himself. But justice, viewed as a single 
virtue among others, respects the equal and the unequal (ἴσον and ἀνισον), and is further 
divisible into two species (eid7), of which the one is applied in the distribution (ἐν ταῖς 
διανομαῖς) of honors or possessions among the members of a society, while the other takes 
the form of commutation in intercourse or trade (ἐν τοῖς συναλλάγμασιν). Commutation 
may be either voluntary or involuntary; the former is settled by contract, the latter by the 
principles of penal justice. Distributive justice (τὸ ἐν ταῖς διανομαῖς δίκαιον or τὸ διανεμητικὸν 
δίκαιον) rests on a geometrical proportion: just as the persons in question, with their indi- 
vidual worth (ἀξία), are to each other, so also must that be, which is dealt out to each 
(A: B=a: 8, where B=e.A,and β -ξι ε. α). Commutative justice (τὸ ἐν τοῖς συναλλάγμασι 
δίκαιον or τὸ διορθωτικόν, ὃ γίνεται ἐν τοῖς συναλλάγμασι καὶ τοῖς ἑκουσίοις καὶ τοῖς ἀκουσίοις) 
is, indeed, likewise an equalizing principle (ἴσον), but proceeds by arithmetical and not 
by geometrical proportion, since it regards not the moral worth of the persons involved, 
but only the advantage gained or injury suffered by them; commutative justice removes 
the difference between the original possession and the diminished (or increased) possession, 
as occasioned by loss (or gain), by causing an equal gain (or loss), the latter increasing (or 
diminishing) the amount of the possession by so much as the first loss (or gain) diminished (or 
increased) it. The amount as thus restored (undiminished and unaugmented) is a mean be- 
tween the less and the greater according to arithmetical proportion (α — y:@ = a@:a + 7). 
In connection with this doctrine of Aristotle, cf. Plato, Leges, VI. p. 757, where the geo- 
metrically proportional is recognized as the principle of political justice, but the arithmeti- 
eally proportional, as a political principle, is rejected: it is this arithmetical equality whose 
place in the economy of trade is justly vindicated by Aristotle. (Trendelenburg directs 
attention to this difference, Das Ebenmaass, ete., p. 17.) 

Equity (τὸ ἐπιεικές) is a species of justice, not mere legality, but an emendation of legal 
justice, or a supplementing of the law, where the latter fails through the generality of its 
provisions (ἐπανόρθωμα νόμου ἢ ἐλλείπει διὰ τὸ καθόλου). The provisions of the law are 
necessarily general, and framed with reference to ordinary circumstances. But not every 
particular case can be brought within the scope of these general provisions, and in such 
instances it is the part of equity to supply the deficiencies of the law by special action, 
and that, too, in the spirit of the lawgiver, who, if he were present, would demand the 
same action. 

The dianoetic virtues are divided by Aristotle into two classes. These correspond 
with the two intellectual functions, of which the one exercised by the scientific faculty 
(τὸ ἐπιστημονικόν), is the consideration of the necessary, and the other, exercised by 
the faculty of deliberation (τὸ λογιστικόν), is the consideration of that which can be 
changed (by our action). The one includes the best or the praiseworthy ἕξεις of the 
scientific faculty, the other includes those of the deliberating faculty. The work of the 
scientific faculty is to search for the truth as such; the work of the practical reason 
(διάνοια), which subserves the interests of practical action or artistic creation, is to 
discover that truth, which corresponds with correct execution. The best ἕξεις or virtues 


110 ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND ASTHETICS. 


of each faculty are therefore those, through which we approach nearest to the truth. 
These are— 

A. With reference to that which is capable of variation: art and practical wisdom 
(τέχνη and φρόνησις), which are related to each other as ποιεῖν and πράττειν. ἸΠράττειν 
(action, conduct) has its end in itself, while ποιεῖν (formation, creation) ends in a positive 
product (ἔργον) distinct from the productive act (ἐνέργεια, Hth. Nic, 1.1; VI. 5). Hence 
the value of the products of art is to be found in these products themselves, while the 
worth of the works of virtue lies in the intention. Art, as a virtue, is creative ability 
under true intellectual direction (ἕξες μετὰ λόγου ἀληϑοῦς ποιητική, VI. 4); practical wisdom 
(or φρόνησις) is practical ability, under rational direction, in the choice of things good and 
in the avoidance of things which are evil for man (ἕξις ἀληϑὴς μετὰ λόγου πρακτικὴ περὶ 
τὰ ἀνθρώπῳ ἀγαϑὰ καὶ κακά, VI. 5). 

B. With reference to that which can not be changed by our agency: science and reason 
(ἐπιστήμη and νοῦς), the latter directed to principles, the former to that which is demon- 
strable from principles. Science is a demonstrative ἕξις (aodetkrexh, VI. 3); reason appre- 
hends the principles of science (apy, or ἀρχαΐ, τοῦ ἐπιστητοῦ, VI. 6). 

In connection with the dianoetic virtues, another conception, expressed by the word 
σοφία (wisdom), is considered by Aristotle. This word, however, does not denote with him 
a fifth virtue distinct from those already named, but the highest potencies of three of 
them, namely, of art, science, and reason. In the sphere of art, it has a relative significa- 
tion (σοφὸς τὴν ἀνδριαντοποιΐαν, wise, skilled in the art of sculpture, ete.); in the sphere of 
science and reason, it is taken absolutely (ὅλως, οὐ κατὰ μέρος, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλο τι σοφός), and is 
defined as the science and the reason of those things which have by their nature the 
highest worth or rank (ἐπιστήμη Kai νοῦς τῶν τιμιωτάτων TH φύσει, VI. 7). In one passage 
(Eth. Nic., VI. 7) σοφία, in the relative sense of the word, is termed the “virtue of art” 
(ἀρετὴ τέχνης); but it does not follow from this, that art itself is not a virtue, nor 
that science and reason are not virtues until they rise to absolute wisdom, for all these 
ἕξεις participate necessarily in truth, and all, which do this, are virtues (Zth. Nic., VI. 
2 seq.). 

To practical wisdom (φρόνησις) belong prudence (εὐβουλία), which finds out the right 
means for the end fixed upon (VI. 10), and understanding (σύνεσις), which is exercised in 
passing correct judgments on that respecting which φρόνησις gives practical precepts. 
Σύνεσις is critical (κριτικῆ), φρόνησις is imperative (ἐπιτακτικῆ); correct discrimination (κρίσις) 
is the function of the εὐγνώμων, or the man of good sense (VI. 11). 

Ἐγκράτεια (of which Book VII. of the Nic. Ethics treats) is moral strength or self-control. 
Where this is wanting, that discrepancy arises between insight and action, which would 
be impossible if (as Socrates taught) knowledge possessed an absolute power over the will. 
The occasion for self-control arises in connection with whatever is pleasurable or painful ; 
in the latter case it is endurance (καρτερία). 

Friendship (φιλία) is of three kinds, according as it is based on the agreeable, the useful, 
or the good. The last is the noblest and most enduring (Eth. Nic., VIII. and IX.). The 
love of truth should have precedence before love to the persons of our friends (th. N., I. 
4, 1096 a, 16; cf. Plat., Rep., X. 595 Ὁ, c). 

The natural community, to which the individual primarily belongs, is the family. The 
domestic economy includes, when complete, husband, wife, children, and servants. To the 
servants the master of the house should be an absolute ruler, not forgetting, however, to 
temper his rule with mildness, so that the man in the servant may also be respected. To 
the wife and children he must be as one who rules over freemen; to the former as an 
archon in a free commonwealth, to the latter as a king by right of affection and seniority 


ARISTOTLE'’S ETHICS AND ΦΒΤΗΕΊΙΟΒ. 177 


(Pol’t., I. ch. 4). It becomes him to care more for his family, as human beings, and for their 
virtue, than for gain (Pol., I. 5). 

: The character of the family life is essentially dependent on the character of the civil 
government. Man is by nature a political animal (Pol., I. 2). The state is the most com- 
prehensive human society. This society should not be an undifferentiated unity, but an 
articulated whole (Pol., 11. 1 seq.). The end of the state is good living (εὖ ζῆν), ὁ. e., the 
morality of the citizens and their happiness as founded on virtue (Pol., VII. 8). The end 
of the state is of a higher order than are the actual causes which may have led to its 
existence (Pol., I. 2: ἡ πόλις... γινομένη μὲν οὖν τοῦ ζῆν ἕνεκα, οὖσα δὲ τοῦ εὖ ζῆν). 

Since the highest virtue is intellectual, it follows that the pre-eminent duty of the state 
is, not to train the citizens to military excellence, but to train them for the right use of 
peace (Pol., VII. 2). 

The various Forms of Government are ranked by Aristotle (as he himself intimates, 
Pol., TV. 2) in the same order as by the author of the Politicus (p. 302 seq.), whom he de- 
nominates as τὶς τῶν πρότερον (one who, before Aristotle, had treated of the same subject, 
by whom he can scarcely mean Plato, but rather some Platonist). But the point of view 
from which he enumerates them is not (as in the Politicus) that of legality or illegality, but 
that of the measure in which, in each, the rulers seek the common advantage of all, or 
only their own profit. When the rulers seek rather the good of all, than their own profit, 
their government is good; otherwise it is bad. In either case three forms of government 
are possible, according as the number of rulers is one, a few, or many. Hence these six 
forms of government, whose names are monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (πολιτεία, ‘the 
common name for all polities”), on the one hand; and tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, 
on the other (Pol., III. 7). The placing of the government in the hands of all the citizens 
is justified by the principle, that power belongs to the free as such. The rule of the few, 
or of only one, may result either from wealth or from education, or both. For every par 
ticular state, that form must be sought which corresponds with the given conditions (ἡ ἐκ 
τῶν ὑποκειμένων ἀρίστη). The very best form of government, is the aristocracy of intel- 
lectual eminence and moral worth, whether these qualities, in their highest development, 
be found in a few persons, or only in one. 

None but a brave people is capable of freedom, and only among cultured nations is a 
comprehensive and enduring political union possible. It is only where courage and cul- 
ture are combined (as in the Hellenes, who are thus distinguished from the Northern and 
Oriental nations), that a state can exist at once large and free, and it is only in this case 
that a nation is justified in extending its rule over peoples less advanced (Pol, VII. 7). 

The laws must accord with the form of the government (Pol., IIT. 11). 

The lawgiver must care most of all for the education of the young (Pol., VIII. 1 seq.). 
The supreme end of all discipline should be virtue. Things which are serviceable for 
external ends may, however, and should also be made a subject of instruction, except 
where they tend to render the learner vulgar (7. e., disposed to seek external gain on its 
own account). Grammar, gymnastics, music, and drawing are the general elementary 
topics of instruction. 

art (τέχνη), in the wider sense of the term, as signifying that skill in giving form to 
any material, which results from or at least depends on the knowledge of rules, has a 
twofold object: it has either to complete what nature has been unable to complete, or it 
may imitate (Phys., II. 8: ὅλως τε ἡ τέχνη τὰ μὲν ἐπιτελεῖ, ἃ ἡ φύσις ἀδυνατεῖ ἀπεργά- 
σασθαι, τὰ δὲ μιμεῖται). Nature has left man naked and unarmed, but has imparted to him 
the ability to acquire nearly all varieties of artistic skill, and has given him the hand, as 
the instrument of instruments (De Pari. An., IV. 10). The: useful arts subserve the ends of 

—— i. renee 


178 ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND STHETICS. 


practical life. TImitative art supplies a refined amusement (διαγωγῇ) and recreation (ἄνεσις, 
τῆς συντονίας ἀνάπαυσις); it emancipates (κάθαρσις) the soul from the pressure of pent-up 
feelings, through a harmless (and in other respects positively beneficial) excitation of 
them (Pol., VIII. 7). By κάθαρσις (purification) is not to be understood a purification of 
the feelings from the bad that is in them, but rather the temporary removal, discharge, 
nullification of the feelings or passions themselves (cf. Pol., Il. 1267 a, 5—7, where the satis- 
faction of a passionate desire is represented as producing a ‘‘healing effect”). While the 
representation draws to its artistic conclusion, the feelings excited in the susceptible spec- 
tator and auditor become, by a corresponding and natural movement, stilled. Works of 
art, in which subjects of more than ordinary beauty or elevation are imitated, may serve 
as a means of ethical culture (παιδεία, μάθησις); so, in particular, certain kinds of music and 
painting, and, unquestionably, certain descriptions of poetry also. Art attains its ends by 
imitation (μίμησις). That which it imitates, however, is not so much the particular, with 
which the accidental is largely connected, as, rather, the essence of its particular object, 
and, as it were, the tendency of nature in its formation; in other words, art must idealize 
its subjects, each in its peculiar character. When this requirement is rightly met, the 
resulting work of art is beautiful, although the object imitated may be not (as in the case 
of the Tragedy) more beautiful and noble than ordinary objects, but (as in the case of the 
Comedy) only equal or even inferior to the latter in these respects. The good, when as 
such it is also agreeable, is beautiful (thet, I. 9). Beauty implies a certain magnitude and 
order (Poét., ch. 7). 

The Tragedy is defined by Aristotle as the imitative representation of a weighty, 
finished, and more or less extended action, in language beautified by various species of 
ornamentation [meter and song], which are distributed separately to the different parts of 
the work [the dialogical and choral], acted and not merely recited, and, by exciting pity and 
fear, purging the mind of such passions* (ἔστιν οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας 
Kai τελείας, μέγεϑος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις δρώντων 
καὶ ov δι’ ἀπαγγελίας͵ δ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παϑημάτων κάϑαρσιν, 
Poét., ch. 6). The definition requires that the subject-matter of the tragedy should be 
serious and morally elevated (πράξεως σπουδαίας), and that its form should be esthetically 
pleasing (ἡ δυσμένῳ λόγῳ). The last words indicate the cathartic operation of tragedy: the 
fear excited in the spectator by the tragical events represented and the consequent flow of 
sympathy in him are followed by the satisfaction and subsidence of the tendency to foster 
such feelings (ὦ 6., feelings of fear and pity).+ The παρασκευάζειν πάθη and the κάθαρσις, 


* That, among other things, pity and also fear and menace should be included among the moral ele- 
ments of the tragedy had already been said by Plato, Phaedr., p. 268, where the addition of the third 
element (menace, ἀπειλητικαὶ ῥήσεις) indicates plainly that at least Plato did not contemplate the excitation 
in the spectator of fear on his own account—an interpretation erroneously given by Lessing to the “fear” 
of Aristotle. Cf. Ar., Poét., 11, p. 1452a, 38; 138, p. 1453 a, 4. 

+ The κάθαρσις τῶν παθημάτων is—as has been shown, in particular by J. Bernays—not a purification of 
the emotions, but a (temporary) emancipation of the individual from their influence; yet I would not define 
it, more specifically (with Bernays), as a relief from permanent emotional tendencies (fearfulness, sym- 
pathetic disposition, ete.), obtained by giving way to them for the time, nor (with Heinrich Weil, who 
regards τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων as the subjective Genitive, with man understood as the object) as merely 
8 deliverance from the uneasiness which attends the want of, or the exhaustion which follows, emotional ex- 
citement, but rather (as shown by me in Fichte’s Zeitschrift, Vol. 36, 1860, and in an article on Aristotle's 
doctrine of the nature and effect of art, ibid., Vol. 50, 1867, and also by A. Déring, who a¢gnes from the 
medical use of the term, in the Philol., XXI. 1864), as a temporary removal, elimination, nullification of the 
emotions themselves. In Plato, Phaedo, p. 69¢, κάθαρσις τῶν ἡδονῶν = a deliverance (of the soul) from 
lusts; the καθαρτὴς ἐμποδίων μαθήμασι δοξῶν (Soph., p. 230 6) is one who delivers from such opinions 88 
obstruct one’s advance to true insight; the same eonstruction occurs in Arist. Hist. Anim., VI. 18 (Kae 


ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS AND STHETICS. 179 


the excitation and the natural subsidence of the feelings and their final counterpoise, 
tranquilization, and emancipation, will be the more surely and completely accomplished in 


καταμηνίων), which passage is rightly cited by Doring (Philol., XXI. p. 526) in illustration of the medical 
use of the term. Against Bernays’ interpretation it may be urged that neither his argument for the ren- 
dering of κάθαρσις as “relief obtained by giving way to,” nor that for the rendering of παθήματα as “emo- 
tional dispositions,” can be regarded as demonstrative, and that, according to Pol., VIII. 7, p. 1342 4.1 seq. 
it is not the πάθημα, but the ma@os,a form of “motion” (κίνησις), which is spoken of as the object of 
κάθαρσις. Where Plato aims at the permanent deliverance of man from the emotions by their extirpation, 
Aristotle proposes instead, a temporary relief, to be obtained through their very excitation (by artificial 
means) and subsequent subsidence. After hearing music, witnessing the representation of a tragedy, 
etc., the emotions excited in us are again quieted by their very exhaustion, are in a sense purged out of 
us (καθαίρεται); but although it is only the emotions immediately excited by the given work of art which 
are thus affected directly, yet indirectly all other similar emotions, which fall into the same concept with 
them and into which the emotional tendency might have been developed had it not been thus diverted, 
are similarly purged away; we are temporarily freed (or ‘“‘cleansed”) from all of them, until the neces- 
sity arises anew for their excitation and exhaustion. The object is here not to extirpate the feelings 
(πάθη) once for all, nor to generate apathy or even moderated emotion, nor is it to effect a (qualitative) 
improvement (purification) of the emotions, but rather to bring about a provisional satisfaction of a 
regularly recarring emotional instinct, an instinet which is in itself altogether normal, but which by 
long continuance would become an impediment in the way of other functions, especially the μάθησις (or 
function of cognitive learning), for which reason it must be appeased (according to Aristotle, by allowing 
it just and proper satisfaction) and the soul freed or as if cleansed from it. This instinct is not entirely 
wanting in any man, not even in those in whom it is abnormally feeble, but its nature is most easily recog- 
nized in cases where it appears with abnormal strength (as in enthusiasts), whence Aristotle, in explaining 
the concept of Catharsis (Pol., VIII. 7), begins with such cases. (Cf. Plat. Leges, VII. p. 790 seq.) With 
the Catharsis of the feelings is necessarily connected a degree of pleasure (κουφίζεσθαι μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς), whether 
the feeling itself was originally inspiriting or depressing. (Cf. numerous utterances by poets respecting the 
relief which arises from the expression of the feelings—as, 6. g., Goethe’s words concerning the “divine 
worth of tones and tears,” concerning the emotional relief arising from the production of works of art, 
Zisch., Choeph. Parod., Str.45: δι᾿ αἰῶνος δ᾽ Ἰυγμοῖσι βόσκεται κέαρ. etc. [“ the heart fed with cries of pain”), 
and others.) The object of art is not to transform actually existing emotions (those of common life), but te 
excite and exhaust emotions existing only in potentiality in an audience which is not yet moved, but is 
already waiting to be moved. In itself the Catharsis may operate indifferently on emotions of a noble or 
ignoble character ; but as the man of coarser type craves a coarser species of excitation, so the more refined 
craves an excitation of a nobler kind (Arist., Pol., VIII. 7: ποιεῖ δὲ τὴν ἡδονὴν ἑκάστοις TO κατὰ φύσιν οἰκεῖον). 
Aristotle requires that the need of both classes of the public be satisfied. The proposed excitation of the 
emotions, regarded as a mere means of recreation, is termed ἄνεσις or παιδία, but as « means of refined enter- 
tainment through the enjoyment of a work of art it is διαγωγή. Acaywyn presupposes a degree of mental cul- 
ture. Still, works of high art, which leave the uncultivated man unmoved at the moment when they afford 
the purest enjoyment to the cultivated, may serve as a means of culture for the former, accustoming him te 
be glad and to mourn as and when he ought (χαίρειν καὶ λυπεῖσθαι ὀρθῶς or ols δεῖ) and so refining his disposi- 
tion. This effect can not be produced by every kind of art, but only by that which idealizes, ὃ, e., which repro- 
duces its objects in forms more excellent and more beautiful than those which they commonly or actually 
possess; nor can it be produced in every person, but only in one who is capable of cultivation, hence chiefly 
in the young. Aristotle terms this the ethical effect of art (πρὸς ἀρετήν παιδεία, μάθησις). In this connection 
he lays particular stress on certain kinds of music. The Tragedy (like the Epos) bears, according to its defini- 
tion (as μίμησις πράξεως σποῦυ δαία ς), that elevated, noble character, which makes the “ purification” effected 
by it subservient to “refined entertainment.” This character renders it capadle of serving the ends of 
ethical culture. Still, Aristotle has at least not expressly considered the Tragedy as a means of education for 
the young, but seems rather, in treating of it, to presuppose the existence of a public possessing in general a 
sufficient degree of culture (even though not wholly free from deficiencies in this respect) to appreciate it as 
a means of “refined entertainment” (διαγωγή); but in view of the variability in the mean degree of culture 
of this public, Aristotle can not have meant completely to exclude from among the effects of the Tragedy, 
its effect as an instrument of ethical discipline. With the “Catharsis” effected by any art are in reality 
#lways joined by a casual nexus the other effects of the same,—the latter effects flow from the “ Catharsis,” 
but are generically different from it. The cathartic, hedonic, and ethico-disciplinary effects are co-ordinate 
in conception, and any interpretation of “ Catharsis,”’ which includes in its conception the notion of “ puri- 
fication,” “refinement,” “emancipation from the goadings of low and selfish impulses,” etc., is to be con- 


180 THE PERIPATETICS. 


the spectator, the more complete the work of art is in itself, or the more true it is to the 
objective norms, which are founded in the nature of the object represented, and, especially, 
the less it is wanting (in what Goethe demands in the interests of its cathartic operation, 
namely) in the element of a reconciling rounding off or finale. The feeling awakened by 
the tragedy, though painful, yet contains in itself an elevating and pleasurable element, 
inasmuch as it is a feeling of sympathy with what is noble. This mixed character of the 
feeling is not expressly affirmed by Aristotle in the parts of the Poetica which are now 
extant, but it is affirmed in the Rhetoric (I. 11, 1370 Ὁ, 24-28), where, in the threnody, 
Aristotle finds involved not only the sentiment of sadness, but also the pleasure of 
memory and, so to speak, the pleasure of bringing before the mind in the present those 
things which the hero did in his life, and what sort of a man he was. 

Auxiliary and subordinate to Politics is Rhetoric, the art of persuasion (δύναμις περί 
ἕκαστον τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν, Rhet., I. 2). The business of Rhetoric is not 
so much to persuade, as to furnish a knowledge of those considerations which, in connee- 
tion with any subject in hand, are persuasive. It is of no use to attempt to convince the 
masses of men by scientific arguments. The basis of one’s argumentation must be that 
which is known to all (xowa), The rhetorical art must indeed be able to give an appear- 
ance of equal credibility to contradictory assertions. But the intention (προαίρεσις) of the 
orator must be to arrive at the true and the just. The rhetorical faculty, which may Le 
developed and applied either in a good or in a bad sense, should be employed by us only 
in the good sense. The possibility of being perverted to wrong uses, belongs to rhetoric 
in company with every thing that is good, except virtue; but this fact does not destroy its 
utility (2het., I. 1). 


§ 51. The disciples of Aristotle in the next two to three centuries 
after his death, particularly Theophrastus of Lesbus, Eudemus of 
Rhodes, Aristoxenus the Musician, Dicwarch, Clearchus of Soli, 
and also Strato the Physicist, Lyco, Aristo, Hieronymus, Critolaus, 
Diodorus, Staseas, and Cratippus (which latter was heard at Athens 
by Cicero’s son Marcus), abandoned, for the most part, metaphysical 
speculation, and applied themselves either to the study of nature or 
to a more popular treatment of Ethics, at the same time modifying in 
many ways the teaching of Aristotle—mostly in a naturalistic direc- 
tion. The later Peripatetics returned again to the peculiar concep- 
tions of Aristotle; their merits are founded chiefly in their exegesis 
of his works. The most noteworthy exegetes were Andronicus of 


sidered as un- Aristotelian, because it effaces the strongly-marked opposition in which Aristotle places κάθαρ- 
σις to μάθησις. (Cf., in confirmation, Arist., Pol., VII. 6, 1841 a, 21; οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ αὐλὸς ἠθικὸν, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον 
ὀργιαστικόν, ὥστε πρὸς τοὺς τοιούτους αὐτῷ καιροὺς χρηστέον, ἐν οἷς ἡ θεωρία κάθαρσιν μᾶλλον δύναται ἢ 
μάθησιν. 10. 7, 1341 Ὁ, 86: φαμὲν δὲ οὐ μιᾶς ἕνεκεν ὠφελείας τῇ μουσικὴ χρῆσθαι δεὶν, ἀλλὰ καὶ πλειόνων χάριν" 
καὶ γὰρ παιδείας ἕνεκεν καὶ καθάρσεως,--τρίτον δὲ πρὸς διαγωγήν, πρὸς ἄνεσιν τε καὶ πρὸς τὴν τῆς συντονίας 
ἀνάπαυσιν. Ib. 1842 4. 8: ἐκ δὲ τῶν ἱερῶν μελῶν ὁρῶμεν τούτους, ὅταν χρήσωνται τοῖς ἐξοργιάζουσι τὴν ψυχὴν 
μέλεσι, καθισταμένους ὥσπερ ἰατρείας τυχόντας καὶ καθάρσεως, ταὐτὸ δὴ τοῦτὸ ἀναγκαῖον πάσχειν καὶ τοὺς 
ἐλεήμονας καὶ τοὺς φοβητικοὺς καὶ τοὺς ὅλως (ὅλως TOUS?) παθητικοὺς, τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους καθ᾽ ὅσον ἐπιβάλλει τῶν 
τοιούτων ἑκάστῳ καὶ πᾶσι γινεσθαί τινα κάθαρσιν καὶ κουφέζεσθαι νεθ' ἡδονῆς, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ τὰ μέλη τὰ 


καθαρτικὰ παρέχει χαρὰν ἀβλαβῆ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις). 


THE PERIPATETICS. 18i 


Rhodes, the arranger of the works of Aristotle (about 70 8. c.), 
Boéthus of Sidon (who lived in the time of Cesar), Nicolaus of 
Damascus (who taught at Rome under Augustus and Tiberius), 
Alexander of Age (a teacher of Nero), Aspasius and Adrastus of 
Aphrodisias (about 120 a. p.), Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 
A. D.), Who was called the Exegete κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν; and among the still 
later interpreters (of the school of the Neo-Platonists), Porphyrius 
(in the third century), Themistius (in the fourth), and Philoponus 
and Simplicius (in the sixth century after Christ). 


A. Trendelenburg, Ueber die Darstellung der Peripatetischen Ethik bei Stobaeus, pp. 155-158, in the 
Monthly Reports of the Berl. Azad. ἃ. Wiss., February, 1858; H. Meurer, Peripateticorwm philosophia 
moralis secundum Stobuewm, Weimar, 1859. Cf. Meineke, in Mitzell’s Zeitschr. 7. d. @.- W., 1859, p. 
563 seq. 

The extant works of Theophrastus were first printed with those of Aristotle at Venice, 1495-9€. 
Theophrasti Eresii quae supersunt, ed. Jo. Gottlob Schneider, Leipsic, 1818-21; ed. Fr. Wimmer, Bres- 
lau, 1842; Leipsic, 1854; Paris, 1866. On the works of Theophrastus compare Herm. Usener (Analecta 
Theophrastea (diss. Bonnensis], Leipsic, 1858, and Rh. Mus., XVI. pp. 259 seq. and 470 seq.); on his 
Phytology works have been published by Kurt Sprengel (Altona, 1822) and E. Meyer (@esch. der Botanék, 
I. 8 seq.); on his Psychology, ef. Philippson (ὕλη ἀνθρωπίνη, 2 vols., Berlin, 1881), on his Theology, Krische 
(forschungen, I., pp. 339-349); on his delineation of human “characters,” cf., among later writers, Carl 
Zell (Freiburg, 1823-25), Pinzger (Ratibor, 1833-39), H. E. Foss (Progr., Halle and Altenburg, 1594. 396, 61), 
Fr. Hanow (Diss. Bonn., Leips. 1858); cf. also Th. Charact., ed. Foss, Leips. 1858; ed. Eug. Petersen, Leips. 
1859; Jac. Bernays, Theophrastos’ Schrift iiber Froimmigkeit, ein Beitrug zur Religionsgesch, mit krit. 
und erkl. Bemerkungen zu Porphyrios’ Schrift tiber Enthaltsamkeit, Berlin, 1866; Theophr. Charact. εἰ 
Philodemi de Vitiis lib. X., ed. T. L. Ussing, Hanan, 1868. 

On Eudemus, see A. Th. H. Fritzsche (De Hud. Rhodii philosophi Peripatetici vita et scriptis, in his 
edition of the Hud. Ethics, Regensburg, 1851). The Fragments of End. have been edited by Spengel 
(Budemi Rhodii Peripatetici fragmenta quae swpersunt, Berlin, 1866, 2d edition, 1510). 

Fragments from the writings of later Peripatetics (Aristoxenus, Dicwarch, Phanias, Clearchus, De- 
metrius, Strabo, and others) have been collected together by Carl Miller in his Fragm. Historicorum 
Graec., Vol. I1., Paris, 1848. 

Aristonenus Grundziige der Rhythmik, Greek and German, ed. by Heinr. Feussner, Hanau, 1840; 
filem. rhythm. fragmentum, ed. J. B. Bartels (diss.), Bonn, 1854; Aristoreni Harmon. quae supersunt, in 
Greek and German, by Paul Marquard, Berlin, 1868. Of Aristoxenus treat W.L. Mahne (Amst. 1798), 
Hirsch (Ar. wu. 8. Grundziige d. Rhythm. G.-Pr., Thorn, 1859), Paul Marquard (De Ar. Tarentini Ele- 
mentis harmonicis, diss. inaug., Bonn, 1863), Carl von Jan (in the Philol., Vol. 29, 1869, pp. 800-818), and 
Bernh. Brill (Ar.’s rhythm. und metr. Messungen, m. ein. Vorw. v. k. Lelrs, Leipsic, 1870). 

Dicaearchi quae supersunt, ed. Max. Fuhr, Darmst. 1841. Of Diczearch treat Aug. Buttmann (Berlin, 
1832), F. Osann (in Beitr. zur griech. τι. rim. Litteraturgesch., Vol. 11., Cassel, 1839), A. F. Nake (in Opuse. 
phiiol., I. Bonn, 1842), Mich. Kutorga (in JMélanges gr.-rom. de 0 Acad. de St. Pétersb:, 1. 1850), and 
Franz Schmidt (De Heraclidis Pontici et Dicaearchi Messenii dialogis deperditis, diss. inaug., Bres- 
Jau, 1867). 

On Clearchus, cf. J. Bapt. Verraert (De Clearcho Svlensi, Gandayi, 1828). 

On Phanias of Eresus, cf. Aug. Voisin (Gandavi, 1824), I. Ε΄, Ebert (Koénigsberg, 1825), A. Boeckh (in 
Corp. inser. Graec., Vol. Ii., Berlin, 1843, p. 804 seq.). 

On Demetrius of Phalerus: H. Dohrn (Kiel, 1825), Th. Herwig (Rinteln, 1850), Ch. Ostermann (Hers- 
feld, 1847, and Fulda, 1857); cf. Grauert (Hist. u. philol. Analekten., I. p. 810 seq.). 

On Strato of Lampsacus : C. Nauwerck (Berlin, 1886); ef. Krische, Forschwngen, I. pp. 349-358. 

On Lyco: Creuzer (in the Wiener Jahrb., 1883, Vol. 61, p. 209 seq.). 

On Aristo of Ceos: J. G. Hubmann (in Jahn’s Jahrb., 8. Supplementbd., 1834, p. 102 seq.), F. Ritsch] (in 
the Rhein. Mus., new series, I. 1842, p, 198 seq.), Krische (Forschungen, I. p. 405 seq.). 

Later Peripatetics are treated of by Brandis (Ueber die griech. Ausleger des Arist. Org., in the ADA. 
der Berl. Akad. d. Wiss., 1838, p. 218 seq.), and Zumpt (Ueber den Bestand der philos. Schulen in Athen, 
ibid. 1842, p. 96 seq.). On Adrastus, cf. Martin, 7%eo. Smyrnaeus Astronom., Paris, 1849, p. 74 seq. 


182 THE PERIPATETICS. 


On Nicolaus of Damascus, cf. Conrad Trieber (Quaest. Laconic., p. 1; De Nicol. Dam. Laconicia, 
Diss. Gotting., Berlin, 1867). 

Some of the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias were printed in the 3d volume of the Aldine edition 
of Aristotle, Venice, 1495-98, Alexwandri Aphrodisiensis de anima, de fato, in Themist. opera, Venet. 
1534; De fato, ed. Orelli, Ziirich, 1824; Quaest. nat. et mor., ed. L. Spengel, Munich, 1842; Comm. in Arist. 
metaph., ed. H. Bonitz, Berlin, 1847. On Alexander of Aphrodisias, cf. Usener (Alex. Aphr. quae feruntur 
problemat. lib. 111. et IV., Programm of the Joachimsth. Gym. of Berlin, 1859), and Nourisson (De la 
liberte et du hasard, ess. sur Al. @ Aphr., suivi du traité du destin et du libre powvoir, trad. en fr., 
Paris, 1870). 


Aristotle is reported (by Gell., NM. A., XIII. 5), shortly before his death, to have 
returned to the question, whom he considered worthy to succeed him in the office of 
instructor, the allegorical answer, that the Lesbian and Rhodian wines were both excel- 
lent, but that the former was the more agreeable (ἡδίων ὁ Λέσβιος); thus he is said to 
have decided as between EKudemus of Rhodes and Theophrastus of Lesbos, in favor of the 
latter. During thirty-five years after the death of Aristotle, Theophrastus was the leader 
of the Peripatetic School, and as he died while retaining that office, at the age of eighty- 
five (Diog. L., V. 36, 40, 58), he must have been born in 373 or 372 B.C., and died in 288 or 
287. His original name was Tyrtamus, and it is said that the name of Theophrastus 
was given him by Aristotle, on account of the charm of his discourse. Theophrastus 
and Eudemus, in their works, mainly supplement the works of Aristotle, although, in 
some cases, they attempt to correct him. Of the two, Eudemus seems to have followed 
Aristotle the more faithfully, and Theophrastus to have proceeded the more independently. 
In the details, in which they deviate from Aristotle, Eudemus shows rather a theological, 
Theophrastus a naturalistic bias; the affinities of the former are thus relatively Platonic, 
those of Theophrastus Stratonic. Subsequent writers (6. g., Proclus, in his work On 
Euclid) drew considerably from the lost work of Eudemus on the History of Mathe- 
matical and Astronomical Doctrines. In Logic, the doctrines of the problematical judg- 
ment and the syllogism were specially developed by Theophrastus and Eudemus. In 
Metaphysics and Psychology, Theophrastus manifests a certain leaning toward the hypoth- 
esis of immanence in connection with problems which Aristotle would have solved by the 
doctrine of transcendence; yet, on the whole, Theophrastus remained true to the ideas of 
Aristotle. Thus he, like Aristotle (according to Simpl., in Phys., f. 225), treats the reason 
(νοῦς) as the better and diviner part of man, affirming that it is implanted in man from 
without in a perfect state, and is not developed from within: so also he admits the substan- 
tial existence (χωρισμός) nature of the reason. Yet he teaches that that faculty is in 
some sense congenital (σύμφυτος) with man, but how, our reports do not clearly inform us. 
He, too, terms the activity of thought a species of motion (kévyorc), but not motion in space. 
In Ethics, Theophrastus laid great emphasis on the ‘‘Choregia” of virtue, or on external 
goods as essential to the cultivation of virtue; without such goods perfect happiness, he 
taught, was unattainable. The reproach was very often brought against him in later times 
(particularly by the Stoics), that he had approved the poetic maxim: vitam regit fortuna non 
sapientia; but this he applied, without doubt, only to the external life of man. Theophrastus 
held fast to the doctrine that virtue is worthy to be sought on its own account, and that 
without it all external goods are valueless (Cic., Tusc., V.9; De Leg., 1.13). He held that a 
slight deviation from the rules of morals was permissible and required, when such devia- 
tion would result in warding off a great evil from a friend or in securing for him a great 
good. He opposed the sacrifice of animals. All ethical relations resulted, according to 
him (cf. Ar., Eth. N., VIII. 1), from the community (οἰκειότης) which exists among all living 
beings. The principal merit of Theophrastus consists in the enlargement which he gave 
fo natural science, especially to Botany (Phytology), in the fidelity to nature with which 


THE PERIPATETICS. 183 


he executed his delineation of Human Characters, and next to these things, in his contri- 
butions to the constitution and criticism of the history of the sciences. 

Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the “ Musician,” is said to have renewed the theory con- 
demned by Plato, but which received an essentially new signification through Aristotle’s 
conception of entelechy, namely, that the soul is the harmony of the body (animam ipsius 
corporis intentionem quandam esse; velut in cantu et fidibus quae harmonia dicitur, sic ex 
corporis totius natura et figura varios motus cieri tamquam wm cantu sonos, Cic., Tusc., I. 10. 20). 
He is chiefly of significance on account of his theory of music, which, however, was not 
founded on philosophico-mathematical speculations, but on the acute perceptions of the ear. 
Besides his Elements of Harmonics, he wrote, among other things, biographies of philoso- 
phers, particularly of Pythagoras and Plato. 

Diezearch of Messene (in Sicily) gave the preference to the practical as compared with 
the theoretic life (Cic., Ad Att, 11. 76). He devoted himself more to empirical investigation 
than to speculation. His Bioc “Ἑλλάδος, of which some fragments have been preserved, 
was a geographico-historical description of Greece. According to Dicwarch, there exist 
no individual substantial souls, but only, in its stead, one universal, vital, and sensitive foree, 
which is diffused through all existing organisms, and is transiently individualized in differ- 
ent bodies (Cic., Tusc., I. 10, 21; 31; 37). 

Strato of Lampsacus, the Physicist (who succeeded Theophrastus as the head of 
the School in 288 or 287 8. σ., and continued to occupy that position for eighteen years), 
transformed the doctrines of Aristotle into a consistent Naturalism. Perception and 
thought are immanent in each other (Plut., De Sol. Animal., ch. 3); there exists no νοῦς 
absolutely separate or separable from the body. The seat of thought is in the head, 
between the eyebrows; the (material) traces (ὑπομονή) of the images of perception remain 
there permanently; in the case of memory these traces become again active (Plut., De 
Plac., 1V. 23). The formation of the world is the result of natural forces (Cic., De Nat. 
Deor., I. 13. 35; Acad. Pr., II. 38. 121). 

Cicero names as other and later Peripatetics: Lyco, the pupil of Strato, Aristo of Ceos, 
the pupil of Lyco, Hieronymus, Critolaus, and Diodorus (De Fin., V. 5), but does not 
attribute to them any great significance. A disciple and heir of Aristo of Ceos was 
Aristo of Cos (Strabo, XIV. 2.19). Callipho, also, whom Cicero (De Fin., V. 25), men- 
tions as older than Diodorus, appears to have been a Peripatetic, who taught in the second 
century B.C. Besides these may be mentioned the more erudite than philosophical 
Alexandrians: Hermippus (perhaps identical with the Hermippus of Smyrna, mentioned 
by Athenzeus, VII. 327; cf. A. Lozynski, Hermippi Smyrnaei Peripatetici Pragmenta, Bonn, 
1832; Preller, in Jahn’s Jahrb., XVII. 1836, p. 159 seq.; Miller, Fragm. Hist. Gr., 111. 
35 seq.), whose Bioc appear to have been composed about 200 B. c.; Satyrus, who likewise 
wrote a collection of biographies; Sotion (of whom Panzerbieter treats in Jahn’s Jahrb., 
Supplementbd. V., 1837, p. 211 seq.), the author of the Acadoyai τῶν φιλοσόφων, of which 
Diog. Laértius made much use (date, about 190 B. c.), and Heraclides Lembus (see Miller, 
III. 167 seq.), who, about 150 B. c., compiled a book of extracts from the Βίοι of Satyrus 
and the Avadoyai of Sotion. To the first century B. c. belong Staseas of Naples (Cic., 
De Fin., V. 25; De Orat., I. 22), and Cratippus, who taught at Athens (Cic., De Of, I. 
1 εἰ al.). 

Andronicus of Rhodes, the (above-mentioned, p. 149) editor and expositor of the Aris- 
totelian writings (about 70 B. ¢.), Boethus of Sidon (together with Sosigenes, the mathema- 
tician, of the time of Julius Cwsar), and Nicolaus of Damascus (under Augustus and 
Tiberius) were particularly influential in promoting the study and intelligent under- 
standing of the works of Aristotle. Andronicus arranged the works of Aristotle and 


184 THE PERIPATETICS. 


Theophrastus according to their subject-matter (Porphyr., Vita Plotini, 24; ᾿Ανδρόνικος ὁ 
Περιπατητικὸς τὰ ᾿Αριστοτέλους καὶ Θεοφράστου εἰς πραγματείας διεῖλε τὰς οἰκείας ὑποθέσεις 
εἰς ταὐτὸν συναγαγών). In his exposition of the doctrine of Aristotle (according to the testi- 
mony of the Neo-Platonist, Ammonius) he set out with logic, as the doctrine of demon- 
stration (ἀπόδειξις, or that form of philosophizing which is employed in all systems of 
philosophy, and must therefore be first known, cf. Arist., Met., ΤΥ. 3, 1006 Ὁ, 11); the 
customary arrangement of the works of Aristotle (which in all probability originated with 
him), following this principle, begins with the Logic (Analytics) or ‘‘Organon.” His 
pupil, Boethus (among whose friends belonged Strabo the geographer, an adherent of 
Stoicism), judged, on the other hand, that Physics was the doctrine most closely related to 
us and most easily understood, and maintained, therefore, that philosophical instruction 
should commence with it. Each of them held fast to the axiom, that the mpayyateiac 
(complexes of related bodies of investigation, hence separate bodies of philosophical doc- 
trine, branch-sciences of philosophy) were to be arranged according to the principle of an 
advance from the πρότερον πρὸς ἡμᾶς (the prior for us) to the πρότερον φύσει (the prior by 
nature). Diodotus, the brother of Boethus, was also a Peripatetic philosopher (Strabo, VEL 
2. 24). Boethus seems, at least in some respects, to have been followed by Xenarchus, 
who taught at Alexandria, Athens, and Rome. Nicolaus of Damascus set forth the Peri- 
patetic philosophy in compendia, following in the Metaphysics a different order from that 
followed by Andronicus in his edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The Alexandrian Peri- 
patetic, Aristo, who lived at about this same time, seems to have occupied himself chiefly 
with logic and physics. Apuleius (De Dogm. Pi., III.) ascribes to him a computation of 
the syllogistic figures, and he may also have been the author of an exegesis of the 
Categories, which is mentioned by Simplicius, as also of a work on the Nile, mentioned by 
Strabo (XVII. 1, 5), and with which was connected a dispute between this Peripatetic and 
the eclectic Platonist, Eudorus, on a question of priority (see below, § 65). 

In many of the Peripatetics of this later period we find an approximation toward 
Stoicism,—so in particular in the author of the work De Mundo (περὶ κόσμου), which con- 
tains many doctrines taken from the Stoic Posidonius, and was probably composed in the 
first century B. C., or near the time of the birth of Christ; and so, also, in other regards, 
in the work of Aristocles of Messene (in Sicily), the teacher of Alexander of Aphrodisias. 
Through this sort of Eclecticism the way was prepared for the later blending together of 
the leading systems in Neo-Platonism. 

The principal merit of the Peripatetics of the times of the emperors rests on their 
exegesis of the works of Aristotle. Explanatory notes to the Categories, as also to the De 
Coelo, were written both by Alexander of Aig, who was one of Nero’s teachers, and by 
Aspasius, and by the latter, also, to the De Interpretatione, the Physics, the Metaphysics, and 
the Nicomachean Ethics. Adrastus wrote concerning the order of the works of Aristotle 
(περὶ τῆς τάξεως τῶν ’AploToTédore συγγραμμάτων), and an exposition of Aristotle’s Categories 
and Physics, as also of the Timaeus of Plato, and perhaps of the Ethics of Aristotle and 
Theophrastus; also a work on Harmonics, in three books, and a treatise on the sun, 
which may have constituted a part of the astronomical work from which Theo's Astrono- 
my (see below, § 65) was, for the most part, borrowed. Herminus wrote commentaries 
on the Categories and other logical writings of Aristotle. Aristocles wrote an historico- 
critical work on philosophy. Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Exegete, expounded the 
Peripatetic philosophy at Athens, from the year 198 to 211, in the reign o2 Septimus 
Severus. He was a pupil of Herminus, of Aristocles of Messene, and of Sosigenes, the 
Peripatetic (not to be confounded with the astronomer of the same name, of the time of 
Julius Czsar). He distinguished in man a material or physical reason (νοῦς ὑλικός or 


THE MOST EMINENT STOICS. 185 


¢vorxéc), and an acquired or developed reason (νοῦς ἐπίκτητος or νοῦς καθ᾽ ἔξω), but identi- 
fied the νοῦς ποιητικός (the ‘active intellect”), through whose agency the potential intel- 
lect in man becomes actual, with God. Of Alexander’s Commentaries there are still 
extant the Commentaries on Book I. of the Analyt. Priora, the Topics, the Meteorology, 
the De Sensu, and Books 1.-Υ. of the Metaphysics, together with an abridgment of his 
commentary on the remaining books of the Metaphysics; his commentaries on several of 
the logical and physical works, and on the Psychology of Aristotle, are lost. Of his other 
writings the following are preserved: περὶ φυχῆς, περὶ εἱμαρμένης, φυσικῶν καὶ ἠθικῶν 
ἀποριῶν καὶ λύσεων, περὶ; μίξεως. The ‘ Problems” and the work “On Fevers,” are spuri- 
ous. Some other works by him have been lost. | 


§ 52. Zeno of Citium (on the island of Cyprus), a pupil of Crates, 
the Cynic, and afterward of Stilpo, the Megarian, and of Xenocrates 
and Polemo, the Academics, by giving to the Cynic Ethics a more 
elevated character, and combining it with an Heraclitean physics and 
a modified Aristotelian logic, founded, about 308 8. c., a philosophical 
school, which was called, from the place where it assembled, the 
Stoic. To this school belonged Zeno’s disciples: Perszeus, Aristo of 
Chios, Herillus of Carthage, Cleanthes, Zeno’s successor in the office 
of teacher and one of his most important disciples, and also Spheerus, 
from the Bosphorus, a pupil of Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, who suc- 
ceeded Cleanthes as teacher of the school, and who first brought the 
Stoic doctrine to a state of complete systematic development, Zeno of 
Tarsus, the successor of Chrysippus, Diogenes the Babylonian, An- 
tipater of Tarsus, Panzetius of Rhodes, who was the principal agent in 
the propagation of Stoicism at Rome, and Posidonius of Rhodes, a 
teacher of Cicero. Of the Roman Stoics may be mentioned: L. An- 
nus Cornutus (first century after Christ) and A. Persius Flaccus, the 
satirist, L. Anneeus Seneca, C. Musonius Rufus, the slave Epictetus 
of Phrygia, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, in the second 
century after Christ, and others. 


Writers on the Stoic Philosophy in general, are Justus Lipsius (Manuductio ad Stoicam philoso- 
phiam, Antw. 1604, and later), Dan. Heinsius (in his Orat., Leyden, 1627), Gataker (De disciplina Stoica 
cum sectis aliis collata, prefixed to his edition of the works of Antoninus, Cambridge, 1653), and others, of 
whom the most important is Dietr. Tiedemann (System der stoischen Philosophie, 8 vols., Leips. 1776). A 
survey of the whole historical development of Stoicism is given by L. Noack (Aus der Stoa zum Kaiser- 
thum, ein Blick auf den Weltlauf der stoischen Philosophie, in the Psyche, Vol. V., Heft 1, 1862, pp. 1-24). 
Cf. Ὁ. Zimmermann, Quae ratio philosophiae Stoicae sit cum religione Romana, Erlangen, 1858; L. v. 
Arren, Quid ad informandos mores valere potuerit priorum St. doctrina, Colmar, 1559 ; F. Ravaisson, 
Essai sur le Stoicisme, Paris, 1856; F. Leferriére, Mémoire concernant Vinfluence du Stoicisme sur la 
doctrine des jurisconsultes romains, Paris, 1860; J. Dourif, Dw Stoicisme et du Christianisme consi- 
dérés dans leurs rapports, lewrs différences et Vinfluence respective qwils ont exercée sur les ma@urs, 
Paris, 1863. The most thorongh investigation of the subject of Stoicism and its representatives, is that of 
Zeller, Ph. d. Gr., 2a ed., IIT. 1, 1865, pp. 26-840, 498-522, 606-684. [See The Stoics, Epicureans, and 
Skeptics, translated from Zeller’s Philos. der Griechen, by O. Reichel, London, 1869.--- 77. 


186 THE MOST EMINENT STOICS. 


Zeno’s works (on the State, the Life according to Nature, etc.), a list of which is found in Diog. Laeért., 
VII. 4, have all been lost. Of Zeno treat Hemingius Forellus (Upsala, 1700), and G. F. Jenichen (Leips. 
1724) ; on his theology, ef. Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 865-404. 

There exist dissertations on Aristo of Chios, by G. Buchner (Leips. 1725), J. B. Carpzow (Leips. 1742), 
and J. F. Hiller (Viteb. 1761), and a more recent one by N. Saal (Cologne, 1852); on his theology, see 
Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 404-415. 

On Herillus, cf. W. Tr. Krug (Herilli de swmmo bono sententia explosa, non eaplodenda, in Symb. 
ad hist. philos., p. 111., Leips. 1822), and Saal (De Avistone Chio et Herillo Carthaginienst, Cologne, 1852). 

On Perseus, see Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 486-443. 

The hymn of Cleanthes to the supreme God has been edited by H. H. Cludius (Gott. 1786), J. F. H. 
Schwabe (Jena, 1819), Petersen (Kiel, 1825), Sturz and Merzdorf (Cleanthis hymnus in Jovem, ed. 
Sturz, Leips. 1785, ed. nov. cur., Merzdorf, Leips. 1885), and others. The other works of Cleanthes (the 
titles of which are given by Diog. L., VII., 174 seq.) have been lost. Cf. Gottl. Chr. Friedr. Mohnike 
(Kleanthes der Stoiker, Vol. I., Greifswald, 1814), Wilh. Traugott Krug (De Cleanthe divinitatis assertore 
ac predicatore, Leipsic, 1819); Krische, Yorschungen, I. pp. 415-436. 

On Chrysippus have written F. N. G. Baguet (Louvain, 1822), Chr. Petersen (Phil. Chrys. fundamenta, 
Altona and Hamb. 1827; ef. Trendelenburg’s review in the Berl. Jahrb. f. wiss. Kritik, 1827, 217 seq.), 
Krische (Forschungen, I. 448-481), Th. Bergk (De Chrysippi libris περὶ ἀποφαντικῶν, Cassel, 1841), and 
Nicolai (De logicis Chrysippi libris, Quedlinburg, 1859). The titles of the works of Chrysippus are 
recorded in Diog. Laért., VII. 189 seq. 

On Diogenes the Babylonian, ef. Krische, Forschungen, I. pp. 482-491; on Antipater of Tarsus: A. 
Waillot (Leodii, 1824), and F. Jacobs (Jena, 1827); on Panetius: C. G. Ludovoci (Leips. 1784), and also 
F. G. yan Lynden (Leyden, 1802), whose work is the more complete of the two.. The fragments of Posi- 
donius have been edited by J. Bake (Leyden, 1810), and C. Miller (in Fragm. Hist. Gr., 111. Paris, 1849, 
p. 245 seq.). Paul Tépelmann (in his Diss. Bonn., 1867), and R. Scheppig (De Postdonio Apamensi, rerum, 
gentium, terrarwm scriptore, Berlin, 1870) treat of Posidonius. 

Of Stoicism among the Romans, Hollenberg (Leips. 1793), C. Aubertin (De sap. doctoribus. qui a Οἷα. 
morte ad Neronis princ. Romae vig., Paris, 1857), and Ferraz (De Stoica disciplina apud poetas Ro- 
manos, Paris, 1863) have written. Cf. also, C. Martha, Les Moralistes sous lempire Romain, philosophes 
et poétes, Paris, 1864, 2. éd., 1866; P. Montée, Ze Stoicisme ἃ Rome, Paris, 1865; Franz Knickenberg, De 
ratione Stoica in Persii satiris apparente, diss. phil., Minster, 1867; Herm. Schiller, Die stoische Oppo- 
sition unter Nero (‘“‘Programm” of the Wertheim Lyceum), Wertheim, 1867; Lud. Borchert, Num Antis- 
tius Labeo, auctor scholae Proculianorum, Stoicae philos. fuerit addictus (Diss. inaug. jur.), Berlin, 
1869, 

Of the philosophical writings of L. Anneus Seneca, the following are extant: Quaestionwm Natu- 
raliwm Libri VII, and a series of moral and religious treatises, De providentia, De brevitate vitae, and 
consolatory writings addressed ad Helviam matrem, ad Marciam and ad Polybium ; also De vita beata, 
De otio aut secessu sapientis, De animi tranquillitate, De constantia, De ira, De clementia, De benejiciis, 
and the Epistolue ad Lucilium. Editions of them by Gronovius (Amsterdam, 1662), Ruhkopf (Leips. 
1797-1811), Schweighduser (Zweibriicken, 1809), Vogel (Leipsic, 1829), Fickert (Leipsic, 1842-45), Haase 
(ibid. 1852-53), and others. Cf. E. Caro (Quid de beata vita senserit Seneca, Paris, 1852), Werner (De 
Senecae philosophia, Breslau, 1825), Wélfflin (in the Philologus, Vol. VIIL, 1853, p. 184 seq.), H. L. 
Lehmann (LZ. Annaeus Seneca und. seine philos. Schriften, Philologus, Vol. VIII., 1853, pp. 309-328), F. L. 
Bohm (Annaeus Seneca und sein Werth auch fiir unsere Zeit, Progr. of the Fr.-Wilh.-Gymn. of Berlin, 
1856), C. Aubertin (Sur les rapports supposés entre Sénéque et St. Paul, Paris, 1857 and 1869), Fickert (@.-Pr., 
Breslau, 1857), H. Doergens (Antonin. cum Sen. ph. compar., Leips. 1857), Baur (Seneca und Paulus, das 
Verhiltniss des Stoicismus zum Christenthum nach den Schriften Seneca’s, in the Zeitschr. 7. wiss. Theol., 
Vol. I., 1858, Nos. 2 and 8), Holzherr (Der Philosoph Annaeus Seneca, “ Rastatter Schulprogr.,” Tib. 1858 
and °59), Rich. Volkmann (Zur Gesch. der Beurtheilung Seneca’s, in Pad. Archiv., I, Stettin, 1859, pp. 
589-610). W. Bernhardt (Die Anschawung des Seneca vom Universum, Wittenberg, 1861), Siedler (Die 
religiés-sittliche Weltanschawung des Philosophen Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “ Schulpr.,” Fraustadt, 1863). 
Cf. Bernhardy, Grundr. der rém. Litt., 4th ed., p. 811 seq.; Octay. Gréard, De litteris et litterarwm 
studio quid censuerit Seneca (Diss.), Paris, 1867; Ed. Goguel, Sénéque, Strasbourg, 1868. 

1. Annaei Phurnuti (Cornuti), De natura deorum I. (περὶ τὴς τῶν θεῶν φύσεως), ed. Frid, Osann; adj. 
est. J. de Villoison, De theologia physica Stoicorum commentatio, Gott. 1844. Cf. Martini, De LZ. Annaeo 
Cornuto, Leyden, 1825. : 

C. Musonii Rufi reliquiae et apophthegmata, ed. J. Venhuizen Peerlkamp, Harlem, 1822, praeced. 
Petri Nieuwlandii diss. de Mus. Rufo (which appeared first in 1783). Cf. Moser, in Daub and Creuzer’s 
Studien, VI. 74 seq., Babler in the WN, Schweizerisches Musewm, IY. 1, 1864, pp. 23-87; Otto Bernhardt, 
Zu Mus, Rufus (@.-Pr.), Sorau, 1866. 


THE MOST EMINENT STOICS. 187 


The teachings of Epictetus (recorded by Arrian) in the AvatpBat and the Encheiridion haye been 
edited by Joh. Schweighduser (Leips. 1799); the same, together with the commentary of Simplicius on the 
Encheiridion, ibid. 1800. German translations of the Conversations of Epictetus haye been made by J. M. 
Schultz (Altona, 1801-3), and K. Enk (Vienna, 1866); Enk has also translated Simplicius’ commentary on 
the Manual, Vienna, 1867 (1866). [The Works of Epictetus, Engl. transl. by T. W. Higginson, founded on 
Mrs. Carter’s version, Boston, 1865.—77r.] Works on Epictetus have been written by Beyer (Marburg, 
1795), Perlett (Erfurt, 1798), Spangenberg (Hanau, 1849), Winnefeld (in the Zeitschr. f. Philos., new series, 
Vol. 49, 1866, pp. 1-82 and 193-226), and Gust. Grosch (Die Sittenlehre des Epiktet, G.-Pr., Wernigerode, 
1867). With the Encheiridion, a work entitled Tabula (wivaé), falsely attributed to the Cebes, who 
appears in Plato’s Phaedo, but in reality a product of the later Eclectic Stoicism, has often been published 
(by Schweighiuser, Leipsic, 1798, and others). 

The work entitled τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, by the Emperor Mare. Aurelius Antoninus, has been edited by J. M. 
Schultz (Schleswig, 1802), and others. Cf. N. Bach, De M. Aurel. Ant. imperatore philosophante, H. Doer- 
gens (see above, ad Seneca), F. C. Schneider's translation of the Meditutions (Breslau, 1557, 2d ed., 1865), 
M. E. de Suckau, Htude sur Mare Auréle, sa vie et sa doctrine (Paris, 1858), M. Noél des Vergers, Hssat 
sur Mare-Auréle (Paris, 1860), Max Kénigsbeck, De Stoicismo Marci Antonini (Konigsberg, Pr., 1861), 
Ed. Zeller, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (in Zeller’s Vortr. u. Abh., Leips. 1865, pp. 2-107), Arn. Bodek, 
M. Aur. Ant. als Freund und Zeitgenosse des Rabbi Jehuda ha-Nasi (Leips. 1868), and J. Schuster, 
Ethices Stoicae apud M. Aur. Ant. fundamenta (in the Schriften der Univ. zu Kiel aus dem Jahre 1868, 
Vol. XY., Kiel, 1869). [Engl. translation of the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, Boston, 1864.—7?r.] 

Besides the works and fragments of works by the Stoics themselves, the statements of Cicero, Plu- 
tarch, Diog. L. (Book VII.), Stobwus, and Simplicius, are especially useful as aids to the knowledge of 
Stoicism. 


The Stoics classed themselves among the followers of Socrates; and they were, in 
reality, so nearly related to Socrates in their doctrines and their theory of life, and were 
to such a degree mere continuators of previous types of thought, that, although they may 
be distinguished from the previous schools, they can not be regarded as introducing a new 
period in Greek philosophy. ‘‘Socrates sat for the portrait of the Stoic sage; the Stoics 
strove earnestly to build up their inner man after the pattern of the virtuous wise man, 
whose lineaments they borrowed from the transfigured and lofty form of Socrates” (Noack, 
Psyche, V., 1., 1862, p.13). The productive element in the Stoic philosophy is indeed not to 
be deemed insignificant, especially in the field of ethics, where their rigorous discrimination 
and severance of the morally good from the agreeable, and the rank of indifference to 
which they reduced the latter, mark at once the merit and the onesidedness of the Stoics. 
But this element is less characteristic of their philosophy as a whole, than is the fact that 
in the latter those elements of humane culture were conserved, which were bequeathed to 
the Stoics by their predecessors, and by their agency these elements gained a wider range 
of influence. The modifications introduced by the Stoics into the form and content of phi- 
losophy were, for the most part, only such as grew out of their tendency to philosophize 
for the many. But the extensive diffusion of a philosophy, together with the modifica- 
tions of doctrine involved in such diffusion, is insufficient, when taken in connection with 
an inferior activity in the development of philosophic thought, to authorize us in regarding 
that philosophy as inaugurating a new period. 

The life of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, falls nearly between 350 and 258 
B. σι; for the exact determination of the dates our authorities are too contradictory. A 
son of Mnaseas, who was a merchant of Cittium (an Hellenic city, but inhabited partly by 
Phenicians), he too was occupied in his early life (according to Diog. L., VII. 1 seq., until 
his 30th, or, more likely, according to Perszeus as cited by Diog. L., VII. 28, until his 
22d year) in commerce. A shipwreck is said to have been the occasion of his residing for 
awhile at Athens. The reading of works written by the disciples of Socrates (especially 
the reading of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and the Platonic Apology, see Diog. L., VIL. 3, and 
Themist., Orat, 23, p. 295 6) filled him with admiration for the strength of character dis- 


188 THE MOST EMINENT STOICS. 


played in Socrates, and in Crates the Cynic he thought he had found the man who, of all 
men then living, most resembled Socrates. Accordingly he joined himself to Crates as his 
pupil. It is said that the writings of Zeno, especially the earliest of them, contained ideas 
which savored of the harshness and coarseness of Cynicism and for which later Stoics 
(probably Chrysippus, in particular) sought to substitute others more mild and refined. 
Of Zeno’s work on the State, it was said (Diog. L., VII. 4) that he wrote it ἐπὶ τῆς τοῦ 
κυνὸς οὐρᾶς. Not deriving permanent satisfaction from the Cynic philosopher, he is said to 
have addressed himself to Stilpo, from whom Crates in vain sought again to tear him 
away (Diog. L., VII. 24); then he heard Xenocrates, and after the death of the latter 
(Olymp. 116.3 = 814 8. ¢.), Polemo. Not long after 310 B. c. he founded his own philo- 
sophical school in the Στόα ποικίλῃ (a portico adorned with paintings of Polygnotus), 
whence the school received the name of Stoic. According to Apollonius (ap. Diog. L., 
VII. 28), he taught 58 years, which agrees with the statement that he lived 98 years; 
but according to the testimony of Perszeus (ibid.) he died at the age of 72 years (for which 
Zumpt reads 92, in view of Diog. L., VII. 9, where Zeno in a letter to Antigonus calls 
himself 80 years old). The Athenians held Zeno in high respect, and honored him (accord- 
ing to Diog. L,, VII. 10) with a golden chaplet, a tomb built at the public expense, and 
(Diog. L., VII. 6) also with a monument of brass, on account of the virtne and temperance 
of which he gave proofs in his doctrine and life, and to the practice of which he directed 
the young. The titles of Zeno’s works are cited in Diog. L., VII. 4. 

Cleanthes of Assus in Troas was (according to Diog. L., VI. 168) originally a pugilist, 

and, while in attendance on the instructions of Zeno, earned his living by carrymg water 

and kneading dough in the night. He grasped philosophical doctrines slowly and with 
difficulty, but held faithfully to that which he had once taken in, whence Zeno is said to 
have compared him to a hard tablet, on which it was difficult to write, but which retained 
permanently the characters once inscribed on it. According to Diog. L. (VII 176), he 
remained nineteen years the pupil of Zeno, whom he then succeeded as director of the 
school. For the titles of his written works, see Diog. L., VII. 174, 175. 

Noteworthy pupils of Zeno, besides Cleanthes, were Perseeus of Cittium, to whom we 
owe several valuable literary notices (he repaired in 278 B. c., with his pupil Aratus of 
Soli, from Athens to the court of the Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas); Aristo of 
Chios, who undervalued the theoretical, rejected logic as useless, and physics as a science 
beyond the reach of man, and declared all things except virtue and vice to be indifferent; 
and Herillus of Carthage, who, on the contrary, defined the chief business of man as 
knowledge (ἐπιστήμη), but recognized besides it another secondary end (ὑποτελές, Diog. L., 
VII. 165): according to him, the gifts of fortune are treasures of the unwise, but the 
highest good of the wise man is knowledge. 

Chrysippus of Soli or Tarsus in Cicilia (282-209 B. c.), the successor of Cleanthes, 
became, through his elaboration of the system on all its sides, a sort of second founder of 
the Stoic school, so that it was said (Diog. L., VII. 183) that “without Chrysippus, the 
Stoa had not existed” (Et μὴ yap ἣν Χρύσιππος, οὐκ ἂν ἣν Στοά). Yet in his works he was 
very diffuse. He is said to have written daily five hundred lines, and to have composed 
seven hundred and five books, which were largely filled with citations from other authors, 
especially from poets, and with numerous repetitions and corrections of what had gone 
before (Diog. L., VII. 180 566. 

After Chrysippus, Sphzerus from the Bosphorus was one of the most celebrated of 
the disciples of Cleanthes. The Stoic Boéthus appears to have been a contemporary and 
condisciple of Chrysippus (as may be inferred from Diog. L., VII. 54). 

The successors of Chrysippus were Zeno of Tarsus and Diogenes the Babylonian (from 


THE MOST EMINENT STOICS. 189 


Seleucia on the Tigris), of whom Crates of Mallos, perhaps also Aristarchus and certainly 
Apollodorus, the author of the Χρονικά (written after 144 8. c.) and other works, were pupils. 
The next leader of the school after them was Antipater of Tarsus. Diogenes went (accord- 
ing to Gell., N. A., XV. 11) in the year 155 B. c., together with Carneades, the Academic, 
and Critolaus, the Peripatetic, to Rome, as an embassador of the Athenians, commissioned 
to procure the remission of a pecuniary fine which had been laid upon them. Through 
the public discourses of these philosophers Greek philosophy was first made known at 
_ Rome; but it was unfavorably received by the Senate. “The Peripatetic, Critolaus, 
fascinated the Roman youth by the cleverness and aptness of his style; the Academic, 
Carneades, by his forcible delivery and brilliant acuteness; the Stoic, Diogenes, by the 
mild and tranquil flow of his discourses.” (On the sending of these men to Rome in the 
year 155 8. c., cf. Wiskeman, G.-Pr., Hersfeld, 1867.) The elder Cato was unwilling that 
the public policy of Rome, which for the Roman youth was the supreme norm of judgment 
and action, and was possessed of unconditional authority, should, through the influence of 
foreign philosophers, become subordinated in the consciousness of these youth to a more 
universal ethical norm. He insisted on the earliest possible dismissal of these embas- 
sadors. In his view, the condemnation of Socrates, as the author of such corrupting 
speculation, was just and was well done. A decree of the Senate, in the year 150 B.c., 
ordered the banishment from Rome of all foreign philosophers and teachers of rhetoric. 

Panetius of Rhodes (about 180-111 B. c.), a disciple of Diogenes, won over to Greek 
philosophy such members of the Roman aristocracy as Lelius and Scipio (the latter of 
whom, according to Cic., Acad., II. 2. 5, et al., he accompanied on his diplomatic journey to 
Alexandria, 143 B. c.). He toned down the harsher elements of the Stoic doctrine (Cic., 
De Fin., IV. 28), aimed at a less rugged and more brilliant rhetorical style, and, in addition 
to the authority of the earlier Stoics, appealed also to that of Plato, Aristotle, Xenocrates, 
Theophrastus, and Diczarch. Inclined more to doubt than to inflexible dogmatism, he 
denied the possibility of astrological prognostications, combated all forms of divination, 
abandoned the doctrine of the destruction of the world by fire, on which Boéthus and 
other Stoics had already had doubts, and with Socratic modesty confessed that he was 
still far from haying attained to perfect wisdom. His work περὲ tov καθήκοντος forms the 
basis of Cicero’s De Offictis (Cic., De Off, III. 2; Ad Att, XVI. 11). With him begins 
the leaning of Stoicism toward Eclecticism (a change largely due to Roman influences). 
Among the disciples of Panztius were the celebrated jurist and Pontifex Maximus, Q. 
Mucius Sceeyola (died 82 B.c.), who distinguished three theologies: the theology of the 
poets, the theology of the philosophers, and the theology of statesmen. The first was 
anthropomorphic and anthropopathic, and therefore false and ignoble. The second was 
rational and true, but impracticable. The third, on which the maintenance of the estab- 
lished cultus depended, was indispensable. (Of a similar nature were the opinions of M. 
Terentius Varro [115-25 Β. c.], who, educated by Antiochus of Ascalon, the Academic, 
was, like the latter, an eclectic in philosophy, but interpreted the religious myths alle- 
gorically, as did the Stoics, and conceived God as the soul of the universe.) 

Posidonius of Apamea (in Syria), whose school was located at Rhodes, —where,among 
others, Cicero and Pompey heard him,—was a disciple of Panztius, and was regarded as the 
man of the most comprehensive and thorough learning (πολυμαθέστατος and ἐπιστημονικώ- 
τατος) among all the Stoics. He returned again toward dogmatism, blended Aristotelian 
and Platonic with Stoic doctrines, and took such pleasure in high-sounding discourse, that 
Strabo (III. p. 147) avers he was “inspired with hyperboles.” About the same time 
lived the Stoic Apollodorus Ephillus, or, rather, Ephelus (ὁ ἔφηλος, lentiginosus). 

The Stoic Athenodorus of Tarsus was superintendent of the Pergamean Library, and 





190 THE MOST EMINENT STOICS. 


afterward a companion and friend of the younger Cato (Uticensts), who approved the 
Stoic principles by his life. Besides him, Antipater of Tyre. who died at Athens about 
45 B. C., was also a teacher of the younger Cato. The Stoic Apollonides, a friend of Cato, 
was with the latter during his last days. 

Diodotus was (about 85 B. 6.) a teacher of Cicero, and afterward (until his death, about 
60 B. c.) a member of his family and his friend. Athenodorus, the son of Sandon, and 
perhaps a pupil of Posidonius, was (together with Arius of Alexandria, who is probably 
identical with the eclectic Platonist, Arius Didymus) a teacher of Octavianus Augustus. 
The Stoic Heraclitus (or Heraclides), the author of the ‘‘ Homerie Allegories”’ (ed. Mehler, 
Leyden, 1851), seems to have lived near or in the time of Augustus. Under Tiberius, 
Attalus, one of Seneca’s tutors, taught at Rome. An instructor of Nero was Cheeremon, 
who appears afterward to have presided over a school at Alexandria. 

L. Annzeus Seneca, born at Cordova (in Spain), was the son of M. Annzeus Seneca, the 
rhetorician, and lived a. Ὁ. 3-65. In philosophy, his attention was mainly directed to 
Ethics, which science, however, assumed in his hands rather the form of exhortation to 
virtue than that of investigation into the nature of virtue. Seneca resembled the Cynies 
of his time in the slight worth which he attributed to speculative investigations and 
systematic connection. The conception of earnest, laborious inquiry, as an ethical end 
possessing an independent worth in itself, is absent from his philosophy; he knows only 
the antithesis: facere docet philosophia, non dicere; philosophiam oblectamentum facere, quum 
remedium sit, etc., and thus illustrates the Stoic distaste for the Aristotelian conception of 
philosophizing, carried to its extreme. By his hopeless complaints over the corruptness 
and misery of human life, and by his indulgent concessions to human frailty, he is far 
removed from the spirit of the earlier Stoa. 

L. Annzeus Cornutus (or Phurnutus) lived about a. Ὁ. 20-66 or 68 at Rome. He wrote 
in the Greek language. A. Persius Flaccus, the satirist (4. Ὁ. 34-62), was his pupil and 
friend. M. Annus Lucanus (39-65), the son of Seneca’s brother, was also among his 
scholars. To the Stoic circle belonged, further, the well-known Republicans Thrasea 
Peetus (Tac., Ann., XVI. 21 seq.; Hist, IV. 10, 40) and Helvidius Priscus (Ann., XVI. 
28-35; Hist., IV. 5 seq.; 9, 53). 

C. Musonius Rufus of Volsinii, a Stoic of nearly the same type as Seneca, was, 
with other philosophers, banished from Rome by Nero (Tacitus, Annal., XV. 71). He was 
afterward recalled, probably by Galba. When Vespasian ordered the banishment of all 
philosophers from Rome, Musonius was allowed to remain. He stood also in relations of 
personal intimacy to Titus. His pupil Pollio (perhaps, according to Zeller, III. 1, 1865, 
p. 653, identical with Valerius Pollio, the grammarian, who lived under Hadrian) wrote 
ἀπομνημονεύματα Movowviov, from which, probably, Stobeus drew what he communicates 
respecting his teachings. Musonius reduced philosophy to the simplest moral teachings. 
One of his finest sayings is: ‘‘If thou doest good painfully, thy pain is transient, but the 
good will endure; if thou doest evil with pleasure, thy pleasure will be transient, but the 
evil will endure.” 

Epictetus of Hieropolis (in Phrygia) was a slave of Epaphroditus, who belonged to the 
body-guard of the Emperor Nero. He was afterward set free, became a disciple of 
Musonius Rufus, and was subsequently a teacher of philosophy at Rome, until the proserip- 
tion of philosophers throughout Italy by Domitian in the year 94 (Gell, M i., XIV. 11; 
ef. Suet., Domit., 10), after which he lived at Nicopolis in Epirus. There he was heard by 
Arrian, who recorded his discourses. Epictetus emphasizes chiefly the necessity of holding 
the mind independent of all external goods, since these are not under our control. To this 
end we should bear and forbear (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου. Man should invariably strive to find 


---. τ 


THE LOGIC OF THE STOICS. 191 


all his goods in himself. He should fear most of all the god (θεός or δαίμων) within his 
own breast. 

The Sentences of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius are founded largely on those of Epic- 
tetus. His predilection for solitary contemplation, “in which man is alone in the presence 
of his Genius,” gives to his views a certain relationship with the Neo-Platonic philosophy, 
which was soon afterward to arise. 


§ 53. The Stoics make Logie and Physics in reality ancillary to 
Ethics, although they generally ascribe to Physics (including The- 
ology) a higher rank than to Ethics. Under Logic many of the Stoies 
include Dialectic and Rhetoric. The Stoic Dialectic is a theory of 
cognition. It is founded on the Analytics of Aristotle, which it sup- 
plements by certain investigations respecting the criterion of truth, 
the nature of sensuous perception, and certain forms of the syllogism 
(the hypothetical syllogism, in particular). Its changes in terminology, 
however, mark no scientific progress, their only use being perhaps to 
facilitate the work of elementary instruction ; greater intelligibility 
was not unfrequently purchased at the cost of profundity. The fun- 
damental criterion of truth, with the Stoics, is sensuous distinctness 
in the mental representation. All knowledge arises from sensuous 
perception ; the soul resembles originally a piece of blank paper, on 
which representations are afterward inscribed by the senses. In place 
of the Platonic theory of ideas and the Aristotelian doctrine of the 
conceptual essences of things, the Stoics teach the doctrine of subjec- 
tive concepts, formed through abstraction; in the sphere of objective 
reality only concrete individuals exist. For the ten categories of 
Aristotle the Stoics substitute four class-conceptions, to which they 
attribute the highest generality, viz.: Substratum, Essential Attri- 
bute or Quality, Condition, and Relation. 


The Stoic conception of πρόληψις is treated of by Roorda (Leyden, 1828, from the Annales Acad. Lug- 
dun., 1822-23), the Stoic doctrine of categories by Trendelenburg (Gesch. der Kategorienlehre, Berlin, 1846, 
pp. 217-232); ef. Prantl, in his Gesch. ἃ. Logik, Zeller, in his Ph. d. Gr., etc., also, J. H. Ritter, De St, 
doctr. pracs. de corum logica, Breslau, 1849, and Nicolai, De Log. Chrys. libris, G.-Pr., Quedl. 1859. 


The three parts into which philosophy was divided by the Stoics corresponded with 
the three species of virtue (ἀρετή), which, according to them, the philosopher must seek to 
acquire, namely: thoroughness in the knowledge of nature, in moral culture, and in logical 
discipline (Plutarch, De Plac. Philos., 1. Proém: ἀρετὰς τὰς γενικωτάτας τρεῖς " φυσικήν, ἠϑικήν, 
λογικήν). The Stoics employed the term Logic to denote the doctrine of λόγοις, 7. e., of 
thought and discourse, and divided it into Dialectic and Rhetoric (Πίος. L., VII. 41: τὸ δὲ 
λογικὸν μέρος φασὶν ἔνιοι εἰς δύο διαιρείσϑαι ἐπιστήμας, εἰς ῥητορικὴν καὶ εἰς διαλεκτικῆν). 
Cleanthes enumerated six divisions of philosophy: Dialectic, Rhetoric, Ethics, Polities, 
Physics, and Theology; he does not appear to have reduced these, in any case, to the 
three above-named. To illustrate the nature and mutual relation of logic, ethics, and 


192 THE LOGIC OF THE STOICS. 


physics, the Stoics (according to Diog. L., VII. 40, and Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., VII. 17 
seq.) compared the first to the bones and sinews of the body, the shell of an egg, or the 
fence inclosing a garden; ethics, to the flesh of the body, the white of the egg (and the 
trees in the garden ?); and physics (especially when viewed as theology), to the soul, the 
yolk of the egg (and the fruits of the garden?); some, however (e. g., Posidonius), preferred 
the comparison of physics to flesh, the white of the egg, and the trees in the garden, τ. 
ethics to the soul, the yolk of the egg, and the fruits of the garden. 

In Dialectic the Stoics included the doctrine of language (grammar), and the doctrine of 
that which language expresses, representations and thoughts (theory of cognition, includ- 
ing the Aristotelian Logic as modified by them). In Grammar the Stoics accomplished 
very meritorious results, but these are in part of more significance for the history of 
positive philological inquiry than for the history of philosophy. Cf. the above-cited works 
of Lersch and Steinthal (p. 24). 

The fundamental question in the Stoic theory of cognition relates to the means by 
which truth is to be known as such (κριτήριον). A similar question was not unknown to 
Aristotle (Metaph., IV. 6: τίς ὁ κρινῶν τὸν ὑγιαίνοντα καὶ ὕλως τὸν περὶ ἕκαστα κρίνοντα 
opdac;), but he classed it with such idle questions as whether we are now awake or 
asleep. With the Stoics, on the contrary, and in Post-Aristotelian philosophy generally, 
the question as to the criterion of truth acquired a constantly increasing importance. 
The theories of the earliest Stoics respecting the conditions of the veracity of our cog- 
nitions, are rather indefinite. Zeno (according to Cic., Acad. 11. 47) likened perception 
to the outstretched fingers, assent (συγκατάθεσις) to the hand half closed, the mental 
apprehension of the object itself (κατάληψις) to the hand fully closed (the fist), and knowl- 
edge to the grasping of the fist by the other hand, whereby it was more completely and 
surely closed. With this accords the Stoie definition of knowledge as the certain and 
incontestable apprehension, through the concept, of the thing known (κατάληψις ἀσφαλὴς 
kai ἀμετάπτωτος ὑπὸ λόγου, Stob., Ecl. Eth., II. 128), together with the consequent defini- 
tion of science as the system of such ‘‘ apprehensions.” The Stoic Boéthus (Diog. L., VII. 
54) named, as criteria: reason, sensation, desire, and science. But Chrysippus, in opposi- 
tion to Boéthus, and with him Antipater of Tarsus, Apollodorus, and others, proposed as 
a criterion the καταληπτικὴ φαντασία, 7. e., that representation which, being produced in us 
by a real object, is able, as it were, to take hold of or grasp (καταλαμβάνειν) that object. The 
word καταλαμβάνειν is also used in the work ascribed to Philolaus, to denote the grasping 
of an object (ὑπὸ τοῦ ὁμοίου τὸ ὅμοιον καταλαμβάνεσθαι πέφυκεν, see Boeckh, Philol., p. 192), 
and in the same sense it is employed by Posidonius, the Stoic, as cited in Sext., Adv. M, 
VII. 93: “light,” he says, ‘‘is apprehended by the luminous eye, sound by the aeriform 
ear, and the nature of the All by the related λόγος in us;” the expression φαντασία κατα- 
ληπτική is therefore to be explained, not as signifying a representation by which the soul is 
taken possession of or affected, but one by which the soul grasps the object of representation 
(τὸ ὑπάρχον). In Sext. Emp., Adv. M, VII. 244, the φαντασία καταληπτικῆ is defined as a 
representation coming from the object and agreeing with it, impressed and sealed on the 
mind and incapable of existing without the existence of its object (ἡ ἀπὸ tov ὑπάρχοντος 
καὶ κατ’ αὐτὸ τὸ ὑπάρχον ἐναπομεμαγμένη Kai ἐναπεσφραγισμένη, ὁποία οὐκ ἂν γένοιτο ἀπὸ μὴ 
ὑπάρχοντος). There remains, it is true, in every case the second question, whether a 
given representation is of the kind described or not; it depends on our frev determination 
either to allow or to deny to a representation that assent (συγκατάθεσις), by which we 
declare it true, and in this none but the sage will be sure never to commit an error. The 
next distinguishing element of correct representations is sensuous distinctness (ἐνάργεια), 
which is usually wanting in representations which do not arise from an object, 7. e., in the 


THE LOGIC OF THE STOICS. 193 


mere images of the fancy (φαντάσματα). But since it sometimes happens that false repre- 
sentations appear with all the force of true ones, the later Stoics (according to Sext. Emp., 
Ady. Math., VII. 253) found themselves constrained to add that the above description 
applied only to those representations agaiust which uo contrary instance could be alleged 
(μηδὲν ἔχουσα ἔνστημα). 

Representation (φαντασία) was defined by Zeno as an impression on the soul (τύπωσις ἐν 
ψυχῆ), and Cleanthes compared it to the impression made by a seal on wax; but Chry- 
sippus opposed the definition of Zeno, taken in its literal sense, and himself defined φαντασία 
as an alteration in the soul (ἑτεροίωσις ψυχῆς͵ Sext. Emp., Adv. A, VII. 228 seq.). The 
φαντασία is a state (πάθος) produced in the soul, to which it announces both its own 
existence and that of its object (Plutarch, De Plac. Philos., 1V.12). Through our percep- 
tions of external objects and also of internal states (such as virtuousness and viciousness, 
see Chrysippus, reported in Plut., De St. Repugn., 19, 2), the originally vacant soul is filled 
with images and as if with written characters (Plut., De Plac. Ph., IV. 11: ὥσπερ χαρτίον 
ἐνεργὸν εἰς ἀπογραφῆν). 

After perceiving an object, the memory (μνήμη) of it remains behind, though the object 
be removed. From the combination of similar memories arises experience (ἐμπειρία, defined 
as τὸ τῶν ὁμοειδῶν πλῆϑοι). The concept (ἔννοια) is formed from single perceptions by 
generalization, which act may be either spontaneous and unconscious (ἀνεπιτεχνήτως) oF 
conscious and methodical (δ ἡμετέρας διδασκαλίας καὶ ἐπιμελείας); in the former case 
“common ideas” or ‘‘anticipations ” (κοιναὶ évvocae or προλήψεις) are formed, in the latter, 
artificial concepts. ‘Common ideas” are general notions developed in the course of 
nature in all men (ἔστι δ᾽ ἡ πρόληψις ἔννοια φυσικὴ τοῦ καϑόλου, Diog. L., VII. 54). 
These ideas (although termed ἔμφυτοι προλήψεις) were not viewed by at least the earlier 
Stoics as innate, but only as the natural outgrowth from perceptions. Rationality is a 
product of the progressing development of the individual; it is gradually ‘‘agglomer- 
ated” (συναθροίζεται) out of his perceptions and representations until about the fourteenth 
year of life. The technically-correct formation of concepts, judgments, and inferences 
depends on the observance of certain rules, which it is the business of Dialectic to teach. 

In their theory of the concept the Stoics maintain the doctrine which was afterward 
denominated Nominalism (or Conceptualism). They hold that the individual alone pos- 
sesses real existence, and that the universal exists only in us, in the form of subjective 
thought (Plut., De Plac. Ph., 1. 10: οἱ ἀπὸ Ζήνωνος Στωϊκοὶ ἐννοήματα ἡμέτερα τὰς ἰδέας 
ἔφασαν). That Zeno put forth this doctrine in express opposition to the Platonic theory of 
ideas, is affirmed by Stob., Hcil., I. 332. 

The four most general concepts (τὰ γενεκώτατα), which with the Stoics take the place of 
the ten categories of Aristotle, are: 1. τὸ ὑποκείμενον (the substratum); 2. τὸ ποιόν, or, 
more exactly, τὸ ποιὸν ὑποκείμενον (essential quality); 3. τὸ πὼς ἔχον, or, more exactly, 
τὸ πὼς ἔχον ποιὸν ὑποκείμενον (accidental state or condition); 4. τὸ πρός τι πὼς ἔχον, or 
more exactly, τὸ πρός τι πὼς ἔχον ποιὸν ὑποκείμενον (relation). 

In their doctrine of the Syllogism the Stoics began with the hypothetical syllogism 
which (according to Boéth., De Syllog. Hypoth., p. 606) was first considered by the two Aris- 
totelians, Theophrastus and Eudemus (most fully by the latter). Chrysippus (according 
to Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., VIII. 223) placed at the head of his doctrine of the syllogism, 
five ‘“non-apodictic syllogisms” (συλλογισμοὶ ἀναπόδεικτοι), in Which the Major Premise 
(λῆμμα) posited two terms as either standing or falling together, while the Minor Premise 
(πρόσληψις) categorically affirmed or denied one of these terms, and the Conclusion (ἐπεφορά) 
stated what then resulted for the other term. Cf. Prantl, Gesch. der Log., I. pp. 467-496; 
Zeller, Philos. der Gr., 2d ed., 111. p. 98 seq. 

13 


194 THE PHYSICS OF THE STOICS. 


§54. Physics, with the Stoics, includes not only Cosmology, but also 
Theology. The Stoics teach that whatever is real is material. Matter 
and force are the two ultimate principles. Matter is yer se motionless 
and unformed, though capable of receiving all motions and all forms. 
Force is the active, moving, and molding principle. It is inseparably 
joined with matter. The working force in the universe is God. The 
world is bounded and spherical. It possesses a general unity, while 
containing the greatest variety in its several parts. The beauty-and 
adaptation of the world can only have come from a thinking mind, 
and prove, therefore, the existence of Deity. Since the world con- 
tains parts endowed with self-consciousness, the world as a whole, 
which must be more perfect than any of its parts, can not be uncon- 
scious; the consciousness which belongs to the universe is Deity. The 
latter permeates the world as an all-pervading breath, as artistically 
creative fire, as the soul and reason of the All, and contains the rational 
germs of all things (λόγοι σπερματικοί). The formation of the world 
takes place by the transformation of the divine original fire into air 
and water ; of this water, one part becomes earth, another part remains 
water, and a third part is changed by evaporation to air, which, again, 
is subsequently rekindled into fire. The two denser elements, earth 
and water, are mainly passive; the two finer ones, air and fire, are 
mainly active. At the end of a certain cosmical period all things are 
reabsorbed into the Deity, the whole universe being resolved into fire 
in a general conflagration. ‘The evolution of the world then begins 
anew, and so on without end. The rise and decay of the world are 
controlled by an absolute necessity, which is only another expression 
for the subjection of nature to law or for the divine reason; this 
necessity is at once fate (εἱμαρμένη) and the providence (πρόνοιαν, 
which governs all things. The human soul is a part of the Deity, or 
an emanation from the same; the soul and its source act and react 
upon each other. The soul is the warm breath in us. Although it 
outlives the body, it is yet perishable, and can only endure, at the 
longest, till the termination of the world-period in which it exists. 
Its parts are the five senses, the faculty of speech, the generative 
faculty, and the governing force (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν), which is situated in 
the heart, and to which belong representations, desires, and under- 
standing. 


Of the natural philosophy, psychology, and theology of the Stoics, treat Justus Lipsius (Physiologia 
Stoicorum, Antw. 1610), Jac. Thomasius (De Stoic. mundi exustione, Leipsic, 1672), Mich. Sonntag (De 
palingenesia Stoic., Jena, 1760), Joh. Mich. Kern (Stoicorum Dogmata de Deo, Gott. 1761), Ch. Meiners 


THE PHYSICS OF THE ΒΤΟΙΟΒ. 195 


4<omm. de Stoicorum sententia de animorum post mortem statu et fatis, in his Verm. philos, Schriften, 
«eips. 1775-76. Vol. 11.. pp. 265 seq.), Th. A. Suabedissen (Cur pauct semper fuerint physiologiae Stoi- 
trun sectatores, Cassel, 1813), D. Zimmermann (Quue ratio philosophiae Stoicae sit cwm religione Lo- 
mana, Erlangen, 1858), R. Ehlers (Vis ac potestus, quam philosophia antigua, imprimis Platonica εἰ 
Stoica, in doctr. apologetarum sec. 11. habuerit, Gott. 1859), O. Heine (Stoicorwm de fato doctrina, 
comm. Portensis, Nuremberg, 1859)—¢f. O. Heine (Stobaei Eclog. loci nonnulli ad St. philos. pertin. emend., 
G. Pr., Hirschberg, 1869)—C. Wachsmuth (Die Ansichten der Stoiker iiber Mantik und Ddmonen, Berlin, 
1860), F. Winter (Stoicorum pantheismus et principia doctr. ethicae guomodo sint inter se apta ac con- 
neca, G.-Pr., Wittenberg, 1863). 


Theology and all other doctrines which Aristotle included under metaphysics, were 
assigned by the Stoics, for whom every thing real was material, to physics. But although 
they accorded to physics, as comprehending speculative theology, the highest rank among 
the philosophical disciplines, yet it was cultivated by them in fact with less zeal than was 
ethics. This is specially evidenced by the fact that they proceeded more independently in 
logic and ethics than in physics, for which they went back substantially to the Heraclitean 
natural philosophy. 

Instead of the four Aristotelian ἀρχαὶ or principles (matter, form, working cause, and 
final cause, which, indeed, Aristotle had himself already reduced, in a certain aspect, to 
two), the Stoics name two principles: τὸ ποιοῦν and τὸ πάσχον, or the active and the passive 
principles. These principles are regarded by them as inseparably united in all forms of 
existence, including the highest. Hence they conceive the human and even the divine 
spirit, not as immaterial intelligence (vovc), but rather as force, embodied in the finest and 
highest material substances, The Stoics, therefore, differ from Aristotle, as Aristotle 
differed from Plato, and as Theophrastus (in a measure) and more especially Strato of 
Lampsacus and his followers differed from Aristotle, namely, in the increased tendency 
which they manifest to substitute the idea of immanence for that of transcendence. 

According to Diog. L., VII. 134, the Stoics defined the passive principle as unqualified 
substance (ἄποιος οὐσία) or matter (iAy), and the active principle as the reason immanent 
im matter (ὁ ἐν αὐτῇ λόγος) or Deity (ὁ θεός). The former is the constituent, the latter 
the formative principle of things (Senec., Hpist., 65. 2: dicunt, ut scis, Stoici nostri, due esse 
in rerum natura, ex quibus omnia fiant, causam et materiam. Materia jacet iners, res ad 
omnia parata, cessatura, si nemo moveat. Causa autem, id est ratio, materiam format et 
quocumgue vult, versat; ex illa varia opera producit. Esse debet ergo, unde aliquid fiat, deinde, 
a quo fiat: hoc causa est, illud materia). The highest rational force dwells in the finest 
matter. The principle of life is heat (Cic., De Nat. Deorum, II. 9: [according to the doc- 
trine of the Stoics] omne quod vivit, sive animal, sive terra editwm, id vivit propter inclusum 
tn 60 calorem. Ex quo intelligi debet, eam caloris naturam vim habere in se vitalem per omnem 
mundum pertinentem). This vital heat the Stoies derived from τὸ πνεῦμα διῆκον δὲ ὅλου 
κόσμου (the spirit that pervades the whole world) or τὸ πῦρ τεχνικόν (the artistically crea- 
tive or forming fire, in distinction from fire that consumes). Says Plutarch (De Stoic. Repugn., 
41): ‘‘Chrysippus teaches, in the first book of his περὶ προνοίας, that at certain periods the 
whole world is resolved into fire, which fire is identical with the soul of the world, the gov- 
erning principle or Zeus; but at other times a part of this fire, a germ, as it were, detached 
from the whole mass, becomes changed into denser substances, and so leads to the existence 
of concrete objects distinct from Zeus.” Again (ibid. 38): “ There was a beginning to the 
existence of the sun and moon and the other gods, but Zeus is eternal.” That part of the 
Deity which goes forth from him for the formation of the world, is called the λόγος σπερμα- 
τεικός͵ or “seminal reason” of the world, and is resolved into a plurality of λόγοι σπερματικοί 
(Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., IX. 101; Plutarch., Plac. Ph., 1.7). That the Stoic Boéthus, and 
also Panztius and Posidonius, abandoned the dogma of the burning up of the world, and 


196 THE PHYSICS OF THE STOICS. 


affirmed its imperishability, and that Diogenes, the Babylonian, in his old age, advanced at 
least so far as to entertain doubts of that dogma, is asserted by the author of the work 
which goes under the name of Philo, and is entitled περὶ ἀφθαρσίας κόσμου, pp. 497 (ed. 
Mangey) and 502 (pp. 492-497 stand, in the manuscripts and published editions of the 
work, by several leaves too near the beginning, as is shown by J. Bernays in the 
Monatsber. der Berliner Akad. d. W., 1863, pp. 34-40; this section should be advanced to 
p. 502). 

Diog. L. (VII. 140) mentions, as doctrines of the Stoics, the unity, finiteness, and 
sphericity of the world. Beyond the world exists an unlimited void. Time (iid. 141) is 
the extension of the motion of the world (διάστημα τῆς τοῦ κόσμου κινήσεως). It is infinite 
both in the direction of the past and of the future. 

All individual things are different from each other (Senec., Hpztst., 113, 13: exegit 
a se [divini artificis ingenium], ut, quae avia erant, et dissimilia essent et imparia). No 
two leaves, no two living beings are exactly alike. This view was expressed subse- 
quently by Leibnitz in his principiwm identitatis indiscernibilium, in connection with his 
Monadology. 

The new world, which comes forth after each general conflagration, becomes, in conse- 
quence of the necessity which governs all things, in all respects similar to that which 
preceded it (Nemes., De Nat. Hom., ch. 38). Yet not all of the Stoics seem to have under- 
stood this necessity in so rigorous a sense. Cleanthes, in his ‘‘Hymn to Zeus,” excepts 
from the influence of the divinely determined Necessity, all evil actions, saying: ‘‘ Nothing 
takes place without thee, O Deity, except that which bad men do through their own want 
of reason; but even that which is evil is overruled by thee for good, and is made to har- 
monize with the plan of the world.” Cf. also Cleanthes, as cited by Epictetus, Manual, 52: 


"Ayou δέ pw ὦ Ζεῦ καὶ ob γ᾽ ἡ Πεπρωμένη 
Ὅποι ποθ᾽ ὑμῖν εἰμὶ διατεταγμένος 

Ὡς ἔψομαί γ᾽ ἄοκνος" ἢν δὲ μὴ θέλω, 
Κακὸς γενόμενος, οὐδὲν ἦττον ἔψομαι. * 


Chrysippus sought (according to Cic., De Fato., 18), by distinguishing between “ prin- 
cipal” and ‘‘auxiliary”’ causes, to maintain the doctrine of fate, and yet to escape from 
that of necessity, asserting that fate related only to auxiliary causes, while the appetitus 
remained in our own power. 

The human soul, as defined by the Stoics, is an inborn breath (Diog. L., VII. 156: τὸ 
συμφυὲς ἡμῖν πνεῦμα), or, more explicitly, an inborn breath extending continuously through 
the whole body (Chrysippus ap. Galen., H. et Plat. Plac., ed. Kihn, Vol. V., p. 287: πνεῦμα 
σύμφυτον ἡμῖν συνεχὲς παντὶ τῷ σώματι διῆκον). It is a part severed from the Deity (ἀπόσ- 
πασμα τοῦ θεοῦ, Epict., Diss., I. 14. 6). Its eight parts (the ἡγεμονικόν, or governing part, 
the five senses, the faculty of speech, and the generative force) are enumerated by Plu- 
tarch, De Plac. Ph., IV. 44cf. Diog. L., VII. 157 seq.). That the hegemonicon, or governing 
part, was situated in the breast, and not in the head, was inferred by Chrysippus and 
others, chiefly from the circumstance that the voice, by which thoughts are expressed, 
arises from the breast. Yet on this point the Stoics were not all agreed (Galen., Hipp. 
et Plat. Pl., 111. 1, p. 290 seq.). 

Cleanthes asserted (Diog. L., VII. 157) that all souls would continue to exist until the 
general conflagration of the world, but Chrysippus admitted this only for the souls of the 
wise. Panztius appears (according to Cic., Tusc., I. 32) to have denied the doctrine of 
immortality altogether. But the later Stoics returned, for the most part, to the earlier 
doctrine. 


THE ETHICS OF THE STOICS. 197 


As the most important document of the Stoic Theology, the ‘‘ Hymn of Cleamthes to 
Zeus” (ap. Stob., Ecl., I. p. 30) may here find a place: 


Κύδιστ᾽ ἀϑανάτων, πολυώνυμε, παγκρατὲς αἰεί, 

Ζεῦ, φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μέτα πάντα κυβερνῶν, 

Χαῖρε" σὲ γὰρ πάντεσσι ϑέμις ϑνητοῖσι προσαυδᾶν. 

Ἔκ σοῦ γὰρ γένος éopev, ἰῆς μίμημα λαχόντες 

Μοῦνοι, ὅσα ζωεῖ τὲ καὶ ἔρπει ϑνήτ᾽ ἐπὶ γαῖαν. 

Τῷ ce καϑυμνήσω, καὶ σὸν κράτος αἰὲν ἀείσω. 

Σοὶ δὴ πᾶς ὅδε κόσμος ἑλισσόμενος περὶ γαῖαν 

Πείϑεται ἢ κεν ἄγῃς καὶ ἑκὼν ὑπὸ σεῖο κρατεῖται. 

Τοῖον ἔχεις ὑποεργὸν ἀκινήτοις ἐνὶ χερσίν, 
᾿Αμφήκη, πυρόεντα, ἀεὶ ζώοντα κεραυνόν, 

Tov γὰρ ὑπὸ πληγῇς φύσεως πάντ᾽ ἐῤῥίγασιν. 

Ὧι σὺ κατευϑύνεις κοινὸν λόγον, ὃς διὰ πάντων 
Φοιτᾷ μιγνύμενος μεγάλοις μικροῖς τε φάεσσιν,͵ 

Ὃς τόσσος γεγαὼς ὕπατος βασιλεὺς διὰ παντός. 
Οὐδέ τι γίγνεται ἔργον ἐπὶ χϑονὶ σοῦ δίχα, δαῖμον 
Οὔτε κατ᾽ αἰϑέριον ϑεῖον πόλον, οὔτ᾽ ἐπὶ πόντῳ, 
Πλὴν ὁπόσα ῥέζουσι κακοὶ σφετέρῃσιν ἀνοίαις. 
᾿Αλλὰ σὺ καὶ τὰ περισσὰ ἐπίστασαι ἄρτια ϑεῖναι, 
Καὶ κοσμεῖς τὰ ἄκοσμα, καὶ οὐ φίλα σοὶ φίλα ἐστίν. 
Ὧδε yap εἰς ἕν ἅπαντα συνήρμοκας ἐσϑλὰ κακοῖσιν͵ 
“Ὥσϑ᾽ ἕνα γίγνεσϑαι πάντων λόγον αἰὲν ἐόντα, 

Ὃν φεύγοντες ἐῶσιν ὅσοι ϑνητῶν κακοί εἰσιν, 
Δύσμοροι, οἵ 7 ἀγαϑῶν μὲν ἀεὶ κτῆσιν ποϑέοντες 
Οὐτ᾽ ἐσορῶσι ϑεοῦ κοινὸν νόμον, οὔτε κλίύουσιν, 

"Qe Kev πειϑόμενοι σὺν νῷ βίον ἐσϑλὸν ἔχοιεν. 
Αὐτοὶ δ᾽. αὖὐϑ' ὁρμῶσιν ἄνευ καλοῦ ἄλλος ἐπ’ ἄλλα, 
Οἱ μὲν ὑπὲρ δόξης σπουδὴν δυσέριστον ἔχοντες, 

Οἱ δ᾽ ἐπὶ κερδοσύνας τετραμμένοι οὐδενὶ κόσμῳ, 
Αλλοι δ᾽ εἰς ἄνεσιν καὶ σώματος ἡδέα ἔργα. 

᾿Αλλὰ Ζεῦ πάνδωρε, κελαινεφές ἀρχικέραυνε, 
᾿Ανϑρώπους μὲν ῥύου ἀπειροσύνης ἀπὸ λυγρῆς, \ 
Ἣν of, πάτερ, oxédacov ψυχῆς ἄπο, δὸς δὲ κυρῆσαι \ 
Τνώμης, ἢ πίσυνος σὺ δίκης μέτα πάντα κυβερνᾷς, \ 
Ὄφρ᾽ ἂν τιμηϑέντες ἀμειβώμεσϑά σε τιμῇ, 

Ὕμνοῦντες τὰ σὰ ἔργα διηνεκές, ὡς ἐπέοικε 

Θνητὸν ἐόντ᾽, ἐπεὶ οὔτε βροτοῖς γέρας GAAo τι μεῖζον, 

Οὔτε ϑεοῖς, ἢ κοινὸν ἀεὶ νόμον ἐν δίκῃ ὑμνεῖν. 


§ 55. The supreme end of life, or the highest good, is virtue, ὁ, «.; 
a life conformed to nature (ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν), the agreement 
of human conduct with the all-controlling law of nature, or of the 
human with the divine will. Not contemplation, but action, is the 
supreme problem for man. But action implies, as its sphere, human 
society. Al] other things exist for man and the gods, but man exists 
for society. Virtue is sufficient for happiness. It alone is a good in 


198 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIOS. 


the full sense of that word; all that is not virtue or vice is neither a 
good nor an evil, but a something intermediate; but among things 
intermediate, some are to be preferred and others to be rejected, while 
others still are absolutely indifferent. Pleasure follows upon activity, 
(but should never be made the end of human endeavor. The cardinal 
virtues are practical wisdom (φρόνησις), courage, discretion, and jus- 
tice. Only he who unites in himself all virtues can be said truly to 
possess virtue as such. ΤῸ the perfect performance of duty (or 
κατόρθωμα), it is essential that one should do right with the right dis- 
position, the disposition possessed by the sage; right action as such, 
without reference to disposition, is the befitting (καθῆκον). The sage 
alone attains to the complete performance of his duty. The sage is 
without passion, although not without feeling; he is not indulgent, 
but just toward himself and others; he alone is free; he is king and 
lord, and is inferior in inner worth to no other rational being, not 
even to Zeus himself; he is lord also over his own life, and can law- 
fully bring it to an end according to his own free self-determination. 
The iater Stoics confessed that no individual corresponded fully with 
their ideal, and that in fact it was possible only to discriminate 
between fools and those who were advancing (toward wisdom). 


On the moral philosophy of the Stoics, ef. C. Scioppius (Zlementa Stoicae Philosophiae Moralis, May- 
ence, 1606), Joh. Barth, Niemeyer (De Stoicorum ἀπαθείᾳ, Helmst. 1679), Jos. Franz Budde (De EHrroribus 
Stoicorum in Philos. Morali, Halle, 1695-96), C. A. Heumann (De αὐτοχειρία Philosophorum, maxime 
Stoicorum, Jena, 1703), Joh. Jac. Dornfeld (De jine hominis Stoico, Leipsic, 1720), Christoph Meiners 
( Ueber die Apathie der Stoiker, in his Verm. philos, Schriften, Leips. 1775-76, 2d part, p. 180 seq.), Joh. 
Neeb ( Verhdltniss der Stoischen Moral zur Religion, Mayence, 1791), C. Ph, Conz (Abhandlungen iiber 
die Geschichte und das Eigenthiimliche der spiteren stoischen Philosophie, nebst einem Versuche iiber 
christliche, Kantische und Stoische Moral, Tib. 1794), J. A. L. Wegschneider (Zthices Stoicorum recen- 
tiorum fundamenta cum principiis ethices Kantianae compar., Hamb. 1797), Ant. Kress (De Stotcorum 
supremo ethico principio, Witt., 1797), Christian Garve (in the Introductory Essay prefixed to his transl. 
of Aristotle’s Ethics, Vol. I., Breslau, 1798, pp. 54-89), E. G. Lilie (De Stoicorum philosophia moraii, 
Altona, 1800), Wilh. Traug. Krug (Zenonis et Epicuri de summo bono doctrina cum Kantiana comp., 
Wittenb., 1800), Klippel (Doctrinae Stoicorwm ethicae atque Christ. expositio, Gott. 1828), J. C. F. Meyer 
(Stoicorum doctrina ethica cum Christ. comp., Οὔτε. 1828), Deichmann (De paradoxo Stoicorum, omnia 
peceata paria esse, Marb. 1883), Wilh. Traug. Krug (De formulis, quibus philosophi Stoict summum 
bonum definierunt, Leips. 1834), M. M. a Baumhauer (περὶ τῆς εὐλόγου ἐξαγωγῆς, veterwm philos., prae- 
cipue Stoic, doctrina de morte voluntaria, Utrecht, 1842), Munding (Die Grundsdtze der stoischen 
Moral, Rottweil, 1846, “ Programm”), F. Ravaisson (De la morale des St., Paris, 1850), Guil. Gidionsen (De 
€0 quod Stoici naturae convenienter vivendum esse principium ponunt, Leips. 1852), M. Heinze (Stoi- 
corum de affectibus doctrina, Berlin, 1861, Stoicorum ethica ad origines suas relata, Naumburg, 1862), 
Winter (Stoicorum pantheismus et principia doctrinae ethicae quomodo sint inter se apta et connera, 
G.-Pr., Wittenb. 1863), Kiister (Die Grundziige der stoischen Tugendlehre, Progr. of the Werder-Gymn., 


Berlin, 1864). 


According to Stob., Eel., Il. p. 122, the ethical end, as defined by Zeno, was harmony 
with one's self (τὸ ὁμολογουμένως ζῆν, τοῦτο δ᾽ ἐστὶ KaW’ ἕνα λόγον καὶ συμφώνως ζῆν), Cleanthes 
being the first to define it as conformity to nature (by adding τῇ φύσει to ὁμολογουμένως). 


THE ETHICS OF THE STOICS. 199 


Still, Diog. L. (VII. 87) says that Zeno, in his work περὶ ἀνθρώπου φύσεως, expressed 
the principle of morals as ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν, and this statement is all the more 
credible, because Speusippus (agreeably to his naturalistic modified Platonism) had already 
defined happiness as a perfect ἕξις (“habitude’’) in things according to nature (according 
to Clem. Alex., Strom., II. p. 418d), and Polemo (according to Cic., Acad. Pr., 11. 42) had 
demanded that men live virtuously, enjoying the things provided by nature (honeste vivere, 
Sruentem rebus tis, quas primas homini natura coneiliet), and Heraclitus also (ap. Stob., Serm., 
III. 84, see above ad § 15, p. 42) had enounced the ethical postulate, that men should be 
guided by nature in their actions (ἀληϑέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας) The 
“nature,” which we are to follow, is with Cleanthes principally the nature of the universe ; 
Chrysippus, on the contrary, defines it as the nature of man and of the universe combined, 


our natures being parts of universal nature. The formula of Chrysippus was: ‘Liye 


we 


according to your experience of the course of nature (κατ᾽ ἐμπειρίαν τῶν φύσει συμβαινόντων 
or ἀκολούϑως τῇ φύσει ζῆν, Diog. L., VII. 87 seq.). A general leaning toward the anthro- 


pological conception of the principle of morals is manifest in the formulas employed by the 
later Stoics, especially in the following dictum of certain of the latest of them: “The end 
of man is to live agreeably to the natural constitution of man” (τέλος εἶναι τὸ ζῆν ἀκολού- 
Sac τῇ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου κατασκευῇ, Clem. Alex., Strom., II. p. 476). The formula of Diogenes 
Babylonius demanded the use of prudence and reason in selecting things according to 
nature (τὸ εὐλογιστεῖν ἐν TH TOY κατὰ φύσιν ἐκλογῇ); that of Antipater of Tarsus required 
the unvarying choice of things conformable, and rejection of things non-conformable to 
nature, to the end of attaining those things which are to be preferred (ζῆν ἐκλεγομένους 
μὲν τὰ κατὰ φύσιν͵ ἀπεκλεγομένους δὲ τὰ παρὰ φύσιν διηνεκῶς Kai ἀπαραβάτως πρὸς τὸ τυγ- 
χάνειν τῶν προηγμένον κατὰ φύσιν); Panzxtius recommended following the impulses of 
nature (τὸ ζῆν κατὰ τὰς δεδομένας ἡμῖν τῆς φύσεως ἀφορμάς), and Posidonius required men 
to live, having in view the true nature and order of all things (τὸ (jv ϑεωροῦντα τὴν τῶν 
ὅλων ἀλήϑειαν καὶ τάξιν). Seneca was of opinion that the simple ὁμολογουμένως was suffi- 
cient, since wisdom consisted ‘‘in always willing and rejecting the same things,” and that 
the limitation “rightly” was also unnecessary, since ‘‘it was impossible for one to be 
always pleased with any thing which was not right.” 

The true object of the original vital instinct in man is not pleasure, but self-conservation 
(Diog. L., VII. 85, expressing the doctrine of the first book of the περὶ τελῶν of Chry- 
Sippus: πρῶτον οἰκεῖον εἶναι παντὶ ζῴῳ τὴν αὑτοῦ σύστασιν Kal τὴν ταύτης συνείδησιν). Plea- 
sure is the natural result (ἐπεγέννημα) of successful endeavor to secure what is in harmony 
with our nature. Of the various elements of human nature, the highest is reason, through 
which we know the all-controlling law and order of the universe. Yet the highest duty 
of man is not simply to know, but to follow obediently the divine order of nature. Chry- 
sippus (ap. Plutarch., De St. Repugn., ch. 2) censures those philosophers who regard the 
speculative life as having its end in itself, and affirms that in reality they practice only a 
finer species of Hedonism. (This only proves that to Chrysippus, as to the most of his 
contemporaries, the earnest labor of purely scientific investigation had become unfamiliar 
and incomprehensible.) Nevertheless, the Stoics affirm that the right praxis of him, whose 
life is conformed to reason (βίος λογικός), is founded on speculation (θεωρία) and intimately 
blended with it (Diog. L., VII. 130). 

Virtue (recta ratio, Cic., Tuse., 1V. 34) is a διάθεσις, i. 6., a property in which (as in 
straightness) no distinction of more or less is possible (Diog. L., VII. 98; Simplic., im Ar. 
Cat., fol. 61b). It is possible to approximate toward virtue; but he who only thus 
approximates is as really unvirtuous as the thoroughly vicious; between virtue and vice 
(ἀρετὴ καὶ κακία) there is no mean (Diog. L., VII. 127). Cleanthes (in agreement with the 


ςϑ 


200 THE ETHICS OF THE ΒΤΟΙΟΒ. 


Cynics) declared that virtue could not be lost (ἀναπόβλητον), while Chrysippus affirmed 
the contrary (ἀποβλητήν, Diog. L., VII. 127). Virtue is sufficient for happiness (Cic., 
Parad., 2; Diog. L., VII. 127), not because it renders us insensible to pain, but because it 
makes us superior to it (Sen., Zp., 9). In his practical relation to external things, man is 
to be guided by the distinction between things to be preferred (προηγμένα) and things not 
to be preferred (ἀπροπροηγμένα, Diog. L., VII. 105; Cic., De Fin., 111. 50). The former are 
not goods, but things possessing a certain value and which we naturally strive to possess ; 
among these are included the primary objects of our natural instincts (prima naturae). In 
our efforts to obtain them we are to be guided by their relative worth. An action 
(évépynua), which is conformed to the nature of the agent and which is therefore rationally 
justifiable, is befitting (καθῆκον); when it results from a virtuous disposition or from obe- 
dience to reason, it is καθῆκον in the absolute sense, or morally right action (κατόρθωμα, 
Diog. L., VII. 107 seq.; Stob., Hel., 11. 158). No act as such is either praiseworthy or 
disgraceful; even those actions which are regarded as the most criminal are good when 
done with a right intention; in the opposite case they are wrong (Orig., ὁ. Cels, IV. 45; 
correct, by this passage in Origen, the statements of Sext. Empir., Adv. Math. IX. 190; 
Pyrrh. Hyp., 111. 245). Since life belongs in the class of things indifferent, suicide is per- 
missible, as a rational means of terminating life (εὔλογος ἐξαγωγῇ ; ef. Cic., De Fin., Ill. 60; 
Sen., Ep., 12; De Prov., ch. 6; Diog. L., VII. 130). 

All virtues were reduced by Zeno to φρόνησις, practical wisdom, which, however, took in 
various circumstances the form of (distributive) justice, prudence, and courage (Plut., De 
Stoic. Repugn., 7; Plut., Virt. Mor., ch. 2: ὁριζόμενος τὴν φρόνησιν ἐν μὲν ἀπονεμητέοις δικαι- 
οσύνην, ἐν δὲ αἱρετέοις σωφροσύνην, ἐν δὲ ὑπομενετέοις ἀνδρίαν). Later Stoics, adopting the Pla- 
tonic enumeration of four cardinal virtues, defined moral insight as the knowledge of things 
good, bad, and indifferent; courage as the knowledge of things to be feared, of things not to 
be feared, and of things neither to be feared nor not to be feared; prudence (self-restraint) 
as the knowledge of things to be sought or avoided, and of things neither to be sought nor 
avoided; and justice as the distribution to every person of that which belongs to him (swum 
cuique tribuens). In every action of the sage all virtues are united (Stob., Hel., 11. 102 seq.). 

The emotions, of which the principal forms are fear, trouble, desire, and pleasure (with 
reference to a future or present supposed evil or good), result from the failure to pass 
the right practical judgment as to what is good and what evil; no emotion is either natural 
or useful (Cic., Tusc., III. 9, and IV. 19; Sen., Hp., 116). 

The sage combines in himself all perfections, and is inferior to Zeus himself only in 
things non-essential. Seneca, De Prov., 1: Bonus ipse tempore tantum a Deo differt. Chry- 
sippus (according to Plut., Adv. Sé., 33): ‘Zeus is not superior to Dio in virtue, and both 
Zeus and Dio, in so far as they are wise, are equally profited the one by the other.” The 
fool should be classed with the demented (Cic., Paradox., 4; Tusc., III. 5). Without 
prejudice to his moral independence, the sage is a practical member of that community, in 
which all rational beings are included. He interests himself actively in the affairs of the 
state, doing this with all the more willingness the more the latter approximates to the 
ideal state which includes all men (Stob., £cl., 11. 186). 

The distinction between the wise and the unwise was conceived most absolutely by 
Zeno, who is said to have divided men peremptorily into two classes, the good (σπουδαῖοι) 
and the bad (φαῦλοι, Stob., Ecl., 11. 198). With the confession, that in reality no sage, but 
only men progressing (προκόπτων) toward wisdom could be found, goes hand in hand 
among the later Stoics (particularly from and after the time of Paneetius) a leaning toward 
Eclecticism; while, on the other hand, elements of Stoic doctrine were incorporated into 
the speculations of Platonists and Aristotelians. 





THE EPICUREANS. 201 


§ 56. Epicurus (341-270 8. c.) belonged to the Athenian Demos, 
Gargettos, and was a pupil of Nausiphanes, the Democritean. 
Adopting, but modifying, the Hedonic doctrine of Aristippus, and 
combining it with an atomistic physics, he founded the philosophy 
which bears his name. To the Epicurean school belong Metro- 
dorus of Lampsacus, who died before Epicurus, Hermarchus of 
Mitylene, who succeeded Epicurus in the leadership of the school, 
Polyzenus, Timocrates, Leonteus and his wife Themistia, Colotes of 
Lampsacus and Idomeneus, Polystratus, the successor of Hermarchus, 
and his successor, Dionysius; also Basilides, Apollodorus, “ the pro- 
fuse,” author of more than four hundred books, and his pupil, Zeno 
of Sidon (born about 150 Β. o.), whom Cicero distinguishes among the 
Epicureans, on account of the logical rigor, the dignity, and the 
adornment of his style, and whose lectures formed the principal basis 
of the works of Philodemus, his pupil; two Ptolemies of Alexandria, 
Demetrius the Laconian, Diogenes of Tarsus, Orion, Phzedrus, con- 
temporary with Cicero, but older than he, Philodemus of Gadara 
in Ceelesyria (about 60 8. c.), T. Lucretius Carus (95-52 8. c.), 
author of the didactic poem De Herum Natura, and many others. 
Epicureanism had very many adherents in the later Roman period, 
but these were, for the most part, men of no originality or indepen- 
dence as thinkers. 


Epicuri περὶ φύσεως β΄, 1a, in Herculanensium voluminum quae supersunt, tom. II., Naples, 1809; 
tom. X., 1850. Epicuri fragmenta librorum II, et XT. de natura, voluminibus papyraceis ex Herculano 
erutis reperta. ex tom, 11. volum. Hercul. emendatius, ed. J. Conr. Orellius, Leips. 1818. New fragments 
from tle same work (which serve in part to correct and complete passages of Book XI., previously pub- 
lished) are contained in the sixth volume of the Hercul. voll. collectio altera, of which the first part ap- 
peared at Naples in 1866. Metrodori Epicurei de sensionibus comm., in the Mercul. voll., Neapol., tom. 
VI., 1839. Idomenei Lampsaceni frugmenta, in Fragm. hist. Graec., vol. I1., Paris, 1848. Πολυστράτον 
περὶ ἀλόγου καταφρονήσεως (in part well preserved) in the Hereul., Vol. IV., Naples, 1832. Phaedri 
Epicurei, vulgo Anonymi Herculanensis, De Natura Deorum fragmentum, ed. Drummond (Hercu- 
lanensia, London, 1810); ed. Petersen, Hamburg, 1833. (The title should be, rather: φιλοδήμον περὶ 
εὐσεβείας) : cf. Volum. Hercul. collect. alt., tom. 11.. 1862; Spengel, Aus den Herculan. Rollen: Philod. περὶ 
εὐσεβείας, from the Trans. of the Munich Acad, (1864), Philol,-philos, Class, X.1, pp. 127-167; Sauppe, De 
Philod. libro De Pietate, Gottingen, 1864. 

Philodemi de Musica, de Vitiis, and other works, in the Herculanens. volwm., tom. I., IIL, 1V., V., VIL. 
VIII., 1X., X., X1., 1793-1855. Φιλοδήμου περὶ κακιῶν, ᾿Ανωνύμον περὶ ὀργῆς, etc.,in the Herculanensium 
voluminum, p. 1., IL, Oxford, 1824-25. Leonh. Spengel, Das vierte Buch der Rhetorik des Philodemus in 
den Herculanensischen Rollen, in the Trans, of the Bavarian Academy (philos. Cl.), Vol. IIL, 1st div., p. 
207 seq., Munich, 1840. Philodemi περὶ κακιῶν liber decimus, ad vol. Hercul. ecempla Neapolitanum et 
Oxoniense distinwit, supplevit, explicavit Herm. Sauppe, Leips. 1853, Philod. Abh. iiber den Hochmuth 
and Theophr. Haush. wu. Charakterbilder; Greek text and German translation by J. A. Hartung, Leips. 
1851. Herculanensium voluminum quae supersunt collectio altera. Tom. I. seg.: Philodemi περὶ κακιῶω 
καὶ TOV ἀντικειμένων ἀρετῶν, et: περὶ ὀργῆς, etc., Nap. 1861 seq. Philodemi Epicurei de ira liber, e papyro 
Hereul. ad fidem exemplorum Oxoniensis et Neapolitani, ed. Theod. Gomperz, Leips. 1864. ereu- 
lanische Studien, by Theod. Gomperz, First Part: Philodem tiber Inductionsschliisse (Φιλοδήμον περὶ 
σημείων Kai σημειώσεων), nach der Oxforder und Neapolitaner Abschrift hrsg., Leips. 1865; Second Part: 


202 THE EPICUREANS. 


Philodem tiber Frémmigkeit , ibid, 1866 (cf. Phaedr., above). Theophrasti Characteres et Philodemi de 
vitiis liber decimus, ed. J. L. Ussing, Leipsic, 1868, 

Recent editions of the De Rerwm Natura of T. Lucretius Carus are those of C. Lachmann (Berlin, 
1st ed., 1850, with Commentary), Jak. Bernays (Leips. 1852, 2d ed., 1857), and H. A. J. Munro (Cambr. 
1866); translations (in German) by Knebel (Leips. 1821, 2d ed., 1831), Gust. Bossart-Oerden (Berl. 1865), 
Brieger (Book [., 1-369, Posen, 1866), and W. Binder (Stuttgart, 1868), and (in French) by M. de Ponger- 
ville (Paris, 1866), [Engl. transl. by J. S. Watson and J. M. Good, in Bohn’s Classical Library. —77.] 

Besides the works of the Epicureans, the principal source of our knowledge of Epicureanism is Book X. 
of the historical work of Diogenes of Laérta, together with Cicero’s accounts (De Fin., I., De Nat. Deorwm, 
1., ete.). Modern writers on Epicureanism are: P. Gassendi (Hxercitationum paradowicarum adv. Aris- 
toteleos, liber I., Grenoble, 1624; 11. The Hague, 1659; De vita moribus et doctrina Epicuri, Lyons, 
1647; Animadv. in Diog. L., X., Leyd., 1649; Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, The Hagne, 1655), Sam. de 
Sorbiére (Paris, 1660), Jacques Rondel (Paris, 1679), G. Ploucquet (Tiib. 1755), Batteux (Paris, 1758), War- 
nekros (Greifsw. 1795), H. Wygmans (Leyden, 1834), L. Preller (in the Pfzlol., KIV., 1859, pp. 69-90), and 
on the doctrine of Lucretius, in particular, A. J. Reisacker (Bonn, 1847, and Cologne, 1855), Herm. Lotze (in 
the Philologus, VII., 1852, pp. 696-732), F. A. Marcker (Berlin, 1853), W. Christ (Munich, 1855), E. Hallier 
(Jena, 1857), J. Guil. Braun (LZ. de atomis doctr., diss. inaug., Minster, 1857), E. de Suckau (De Luer. 
metaph, et mor. doctr., Paris, 1851), T. Montée (Ztude sur L. cons. c. moraliste, Paris, 1860), Susemihl and 
Brieger (in the Philologus, X1V., XXIII., and XXIV.), Hildebrandt (7. Luer. de primordiis doctrina, G.- 
Pr., Magdeb. 1864), H. Sauppe (Comm. de Lucretii cod. Victoriano, Géttingen, 1864), Rud. Bouterwek (Zu- 
eret. quaest. gramm. et crit., Halle, 1861; De Luer. codice Victoriano, Halle, 1865), E. Heine (De Luer. 
carmine de rerum natura, diss. inaug., Halle, 1865), Th. Bindseil (Ad Luer. de rerwm nat. carm. libr. I. 
et IL, qui sunt de atomis, diss. inaug., Halle, 1865; Quaest. Lucr., G.-Pr., Anclam, 1867). Cf., also, H. Pur- 
mann (G.-Pr., Cottbus, 1867), Jul. Jessen (Diss., G6tt. 1868), and C. Martha (Ze Poéme de Lucréce, Paris, 
1868), and Bockemiiller (Zweretiana, G.-Pr., Stade, 1869). 


According to Apollodorus (ap. Diog. L., X. 14), Epicurus was born Olymp. 109.3, 
during the archonship of Sosigenes, in the month of Gamelion (hence in December, 342, or 
in January, 341 Β. 6). He passed his youth in Samos (according to Diog. L., X. 1), 
whither a colony had been sent from Athens, and it appears, also, that the place of 
his birth was not Athens, but Samos, since the colony was sent out in Olympiad 
107.1 (352-51). His father, a school-teacher (γραμματοδιδάσκαλος), was drawn thither as a 
Kleruchos.* Epicurus is said to have turned his attention toward philosophy at the age 
of fourteen years, because his early instructors in language and literature could give him no 
intelligence respecting the nature of Hesiod’s Chaos (Diog. L., X. 2). According to another 
and quite credible account (ibid. 2-4), he was at first an elementary teacher or an assistant 
to his father. At Samos Epicurus heard the Platonist Pamphilus, who, however, failed to 
convince him. Better success attended the efforts of Nausiphanes, the Democritean, who 
had also passed through the school of the Skeptics and who recommended a Skeptical bias, 
which should, however, do no prejudice to the acceptation of his own doctrine. According 
to Diog. L., X. 7 and 14, the Canonic (Logic) of Epicurus is founded on principles which 
he learned from Nausiphanes. Epicurus made himself acquainted with the writings of 
Democritus at an early age (Diog. L., X. 2). For some time he called himself a Democ- 
ritean (Plut., Adv. Colot., 3, after the accounts of Leonteus and other Epicureans); but he 
afterward attached so great importance to the points of difference between himself and 
Democritus, that he conceived himself justified in regarding himself as the author of the 
true doctrine in physics as well as in ethics, and in opprobriously designating Democritus 
by the name of Ληρόκριτος (Diog. L., X. 2). In the autumn of 323, when he was eighteen 
years old, Epicurus went for the first time to Athens, but remained there only a short 
time. Xenocrates was then teaching in the Academy, while Aristotle was in Chalcis. It 
was asserted by some that Epicurus attended the lessons of Xenocrates; others denied it 


ΓΑ Kleruchos was a settler, to whom colonial possessions had been allotted, and who retained abroad 
the rights of Athenian citizenship.—Z?.] 





THE LOGIC OF EPICURUS. 203 


(Cic., De Nat. Deor., I. 26). According to Apollodorus (ap. Diog. L., X. 14), Epicurus com 
menced as a teacher of philosophy at the age of thirty-two (310 or 309 B. 6.), in Mitylene, 
taught soon afterward at Lampsacus, and founded some years later (306 B. C., according to 
Diog. L., X. 2) his school at Athens, over which he presided until his death in Olymp. 
127.2 (270 B. Ο.). 

A cheerful, social tone prevailed in the school of Epicurus. Coarseness was pro- 
seribed. But in the choice of means of amusement no excess of scrupulousness was 
observed. Aspersive gossip respecting other philosophers, especially respecting the 
chiefs of other schools, seems to have formed a favorite source of entertainment; Epi- 
curus himself, as is known, did not hesitate uncritically to incorporate into his writings a 
mass of evil reports, which were, for the most part, unfounded. He embodied the prin- 
ciples of his philosophy in brief formule (κύριαι δόξαι), which he gave to his scholars, to 
be learned by heart. 

In the composition of his extremely numerous works, Epicurus was very careless, and 
so proved his saying, that ‘tit was no labor to write.” The only merit allowed to them was 
that they were easy to be understood (Cic., De Fin., I. 5); in every other respect their form 
was universally condemned (Cic., De Nat. Deorum, I. 26; Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., I. 1 et al.). 
They are said to have filled in all nearly three hundred volumes (Diog. L., X. 26). A list of 
the most important works of Epicurus is given in Diog. L., X.27 and 28. Diogenes names, 
in particular, besides the κύριαι δόξαι, 1) works directed against other philosophical schools, 
e.g., ‘‘ Against the Megarians,” “On Sects” (περὶ αἱρέσεων); 2) logical works, 6. g., ‘On the 
Criterium or Canon;” 3) physical and theological works, e.g., “ On Nature,” in thirty-seven 
books (of which considerable remains have been found at Herculaneum; a part of them 
are yet to be published), ‘‘On the Atoms and Empty Space,” ‘‘On Plants,” ‘‘ Abridgment 
of the works on Physics,” ‘‘ Chaeredemus, or On the Gods,” etc.; 4) works on moral sub- 
jects, 6. g., “On the End of Action” (περὶ τέλους), ‘On Upright Action,” “On Piety,” 
“On Presents and Gratitude,” etc., besides several whose nature is not evident from their 
titles (such as ‘“ Neocles to Themista,” ‘‘Symposion,” etc.), and Letters. Some of the 
latter have been preserved by Diogenes Laértius. 

The most important of the immediate disciples of Epicurus was Metrodorus of Lamp- 
sacus. His works, which were largely polemical, are named in Diog. L., X. 24. The 
other more considerable Epicureans (Hermarchus, etc.) are also named, ibid. X. 22 seq. In 
the very front rank of the Epicureans belongs the Roman poet Lucretius. Horace also 
subscribed to the practical philosophy of the Epicureans. In the time of the emperors 
the Epicurean philosophy was very widely accepted. (Whether in the passage, Diog. L., 
X. 9, in which the Epicurean philosophy is spoken of as almost the only one still surviving, 
reference is intended to the time of Diogenes himself or to that of Diocles, his voucher, is 
doubtful.) 


-- 


§ 57. Epicurus treats logic, in so far as he admits it at all into 
his system, as ancillary to physics, and the latter, again, as ancillary 
to ethics. He considers the dialectical method incorrect and mis- 
leading. His logic, termed by him Canonic, proposes to teach the 
norms (Kanones) of cognition, and the means of testing and knowing 
the truth (criteria). As criteria Epicurus designates perceptions, 
representations, and feelings. All perceptions are true and _ irre- 
futable, Representations are remembered images of past perceptions. 


204 THE LOGIC OF EPICURUS. 


Beliefs are true or false, according as they are confirmed or refuted 
by perception. The feelings of pleasure and pain are criteria indi- 
cating what is to be sought or avoided. A theory of the concept 
and of the syllogism was omitted by Epicurus as superfluous, since 
no technical definitions, divisions, or syllogisms, could supply the 
place of perception. 


On the prolepsis of Epicurus, ef. Joh. Mich. Kern (Gott. 1756) and Roorda (Zpicureorum et Stoicorwmn 
de Anticipationibus Doctrina, Leyden, 1828, reprinted from the Anmnal. Acad. Lugd., 1822-28). Gom- 
pertz, in his Herculan. Studien (see above, § 56), treats of the Epicurean doctrine of the analogical and the 
inductive inference. 


According to Diog. Laért., X. 29, Epicurus divided philosophy into three parts: τό τε 
Kavovixov καὶ φυσικὸν καὶ ἠθικόν. Logic, or ‘‘ Canonics,” was placed before physics, as an 
introduction to the same (according to Diog. L., X. 30; Cic., Acad., 11. 30; De Fin., I. 1; 
Sen., Hpist., 89). 

Rejecting dialectic, Epicurus (according to Diog. L., X. 31) declared it sufficient: τοὺς 
φυσικοὺς χωρεῖν κατὰ τοὺς τῶν πραγμάτων φθόγγους (that the investigators of nature should 
observe the natural names of things; cf. Cic., De Fin., II. 2, 6: Epicurum, qui crebro dicat, 
diligenter oportere exprimi, quae vis subjecta sit vocibus). To the three criteria of Epicurus 
above mentioned (which were designated by him in a work entitled ‘‘ Canon,” in the fol- 
lowing terms: κριτήρια τῆς ἀληϑείας εἰναι τὰς αἰσϑήσεις Kai τὰς προλήψεις καὶ τὰ πάθη, 
see Diog. L., X. 31), the Epicureans added: καὶ τὰς φανταστίκὰς ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας (the 
intuitive apprehensions of the intellect). [Rather the imaginative, ὦ. ε., representative 
operations of the intellect.—d.] This latter criterion appears, however, from Diog. L., 
X. 38, not to have been unfamiliar to Epicurus himself. No perception can be proved 
false, whether by other perceptions (whose authority can not be greater than that of the 
perception in question), or by reason, which is simply an outgrowth from perceptions. 
The hallucinations of the insane, even, and dreams are true (ἀληθῆ) ; for they produce an 
impression (kcvel yap), which the non-existing could not do (Diog. L., X. 32). It is ob- 
vious, in connection with this latter argument, that in Epicurus’ conception of truth 
(ἀλήθεια), the latter, in the sense of agreement of the psychical image with a real object, is 
confounded with psychical reality. 

Mental representations (προλήψεις) are general and permanent images preserved in the 
memory, or the remembrance of numerous similar perceptions of the same object (καθολικὴ 
νόησις, μνήμη Tov πολλάκις ἔξωθεν φανέντος, Diog. L., X. 33). They emerge in consciousness 
when the words are employed which designate their respective objects. Opinion (δόξα) or 
belief (ὑπόληψις) arises from the persistence of the impressions made on us by objects. It 
relates either to the future (προσμένον) or to the imperceptible (ἀδηλον). It may be true 
or false. It is true, when perception testifies in its favor (ἂν ἐπιμαρτυρῆται, as, 6. g., When 
@ correct assumption respecting the shape of a tower is verified by observing it near at 
hand), or, if direct evidence of this kind is impossible (as, 6. g., in regard to the theory 
of atoms), when perception does not witness against it (ἢ μὴ ἀντιμαρτυρῆται); in all other 
cases it is false (Diog. L., X. 33 seq.; 50 seq.; Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., VII. 211 seq.). 
Epicurus demanded that investigators should advance from the phenomenal to the search 
for the unknown (i. e., to the search for causes which do not fall under the observation of 
the senses, such as, in particular, the existence and nature of atoms, Diog. L., X. 33: περὶ 
τῶν ἀδήλων ἀπὸ τῶν φαινομένων χρὴ σημειοῦσθαι). But he did not develop more minutely 





THE EPICUREAN PHYSICS. 205 


the logical theory of this path of investigation (which Zeno, the Epicurean, and Philo- 
demus afterward attempted to do). 

The feelings (7467) are the criteria for practical conduct (Diog. L., X. 34). 

Epicurus treated only of the most elementary processes of knowledge with any con- 
siderable degree of attention; he neglected those logical operations which conduct beyond 
the deliverances of mere perception. Of the mathematical sciences he affirmed (according 
to Cic., De Fin., I. 21, 71): @ falsis initiis profecta vera non possunt, et si essent vera, nihil 
afferrent, quo jucundius, i. e., quo melius viveremus. Cicero says further (De Fin., I. 7, 22): 
“Tn another part of philosophy, which is called logic, our philosopher (Epicurus) seems to 
me weak and deficient; he rejects definition; he gives no instruction respecting division 
and distribution; he does not tell how reasoning is to be effected and brought to a right 
conclusion; nor does he show in what manner fallacies are to be resolved and ambiguities 
brought to light.” Still, the work of Philodemus, recently published, περὶ σημείων καὶ 
σημειώσεων, which is founded on the lectures of Zeno the Epicurean, his teacher, contains 
a respectable attempt at a theory of analogical and inductive inference. (See Th. Gomperz, 
in the above-cited Herculan. Studien, No. 1, Preface, where an essay on the content and 
worth of this work is promised in the numbers yet to come.) The inference from 
analogy (ὁ κατὰ τὴν ὁμοιότητα τρόπος) is described as the way from the known to the 
unknown. Zeno requires that different individuals of the same genus be examined, with a 
view to discovering the constant attributes; these may then be ascribed to the other 
individuals of the same genus. According to Proclus, in Hucl., 55, 59, 60, Zeno (who had 
also heard Carneades) disputed the validity of mathematical demonstration, while Posi- 
donius the Stoic defended it. 


§ 58. The Natural Philosophy of Epicurus agrees substantially with 
that of Democritus. According to Epicurus, every thing which takes 
place has its natural causes; the intervention of the Gods is unneces- 
sary for the explanation of phenomena. Yet it is not possible in every 
particular instance to designate with complete certainty the real natu- 
ral cause. Nothing can come from the non-existing, and nothing 
which exists can pass into non-existence. Atoms and space exist from 
eternity. The former have a specitic form, magnitude, and weight. 
In virtue of their gravity, the atoms were ἘΠΕ affected with a 
downward motion, all falling with equal rapidity. The first collisions 
of atoms with aah other were due to an accidental deviation of single 
atoms from the vertical line of descent; thus some of them became 
permanently entangled and combined with each other, while others 
rebounded with an upward or side motion, whence, ultimately, the 
vortical motion, by which the worlds were formed. The earth, 
together with all the stars visible to us, form but one of an infinite 
number of existing worlds. The stars have not souls. Their real 
and apparent magnitudes are about the same. In the intermundane 
spaces dwell the gods. Animals and men are products of the earth; 
the rise of man to the higher stages of culture has been gradual. 


206 THE EPICUREAN PHYSICS. 


Words were formed originally, not by an arbitrary, but by a natural 
process, in correspondence with our sensations and ideas. The soul 
is material and composed of exceedingly fine atoms. It is nearly 
allied in nature to air and fire, and is dispersed through the whole 
body. The rational soul is situated in the breast. Its corporeal 
envelope is a condition of the subsistence of the soul. The possibility 
of sensuous perception depends on the existence of material images, 
coming from the surfaces of things. Opinion or belief is due to the 
continued working of impressions on us. The will is excited, but not 
necessarily determined by ideas. Freedom of the will is contingency 
(independence of causes) in self-determination. 


The Epicurean physics is specially discussed by G. Charleton (Physiologia Epicureo-Gassendo-Charle- 
toniana, London, 1654), and Ploucquet (De cosmogonia Epicurt, Tib. 1755); the theology of Epicurus, 
by Joh. Fausti (Strasburg, 1685). J. H. Kronmayer (Jena, 1718), J. C. Schwarz (Cob. 1718), J. A. F. Bielke 
(Jena, 1741), Christoph Meiners (in his Verm. philos. Schriften, Leips. 1775-76, 11. p. 45 seq.), G. Ε΄. Schoe- 
mann (Schediasma de Epicuri theologia, ind. schol., Greifswald, 1864); his doctrine of the mortality of 
the soul, by Jos. Reisacker (Der Todesgedanke bei den Griechen, eine historische Entwickelung, mit 
besonderer Riicksicht auf Epicur und den romischen Dichter Lucrez, G.-Pr., Trier, 1862). ΟἿ, also, F. 
A. Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus and his NV, Beitrdge zur Gesch. des Mat., Winterthur, 1867. 


At the head of his physics Epicurus places the principle: ‘‘ Nothing can come from 
nothing,” together with its correlate: ‘‘The existent can not become non-existent” (οὐδὲν 
γίνεται ἐκ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος, and οὐδὲν φϑείρεται εἰς τὸ μὴ ὄν, Ep., ap Diog. L., X. 38). Of 
things corporeal, some are composite and some (all others) are the constituent parts of 
which the former are compounded (ib., 40 seq.). Continued division of the composite must 
at last bring us to ultimate indivisible and unchangeable elements (4towa kai ἀμετάβλητα), 
unless every thing is to be resolved into the non-existent. All these indivisible and primi- 
tive elements are indeed of various magnitudes, but they are too small to be separately 
visible. They have no qualities beyond magnitude, shape, and gravity. Their number is 
infinite. Farther, if that which we call vacuum and space or piace did not exist, there 
would be nothing in which bodies could exist and move. Whatever is material has three 
dimensions and the power of resistance (τὸ τριχῇ διαστατὸν μετὰ ἀντιτυπίας, Sext. Emp., 
Ady. Math., 1. 21 εὐ al.); empty space is intangible nature (φύσις ἀναφής, ib. X. 2; Diog. L., 
X. 40); it is τόπος (“place”), viewed as that in which a body is contained, and χώρα 
(‘‘room”), viewed as that which admits the passage of bodies through it. 

The most considerable of the points of difference between the Epicurean and the 
Democritean physics is, that Epicurus, in order to explain how the atoms first came in 
contact with each other, ascribes to them a certain power of individual or arbitrary self- 
determination, in virtue of which they deviated slightly from the direct line of fall (Lucret., 
II. 216 seq.; Cic., De Fin., I. 6, De Nat Deor., 1. 25, etc.). He thus attributes in some sort 
to atoms that species of freedom (or rather that independence of law) which he attributes 
to the human will. 

The motion of the atoms is not directed by the idea of finality. The Empedoclean 
opinion (Arist., Phys., II. 8, De Part. Anim., 1. 1), that among the numerous fortuitous 
creations of nature which first arose, only a few were capable of prolonged life and con- 
served their existence, while the rest perished, was renewed by the Epicureans. Lucretius 
says (De Rerum Nat., I., 1020 seq.): 


—— oe 


THE EPICUREAN PHYSICS. 207 


Nam certe neque consilio primordia rerum 
Ordine se quaeque atque sagaci mente locarunt, 
Nec quos quaeque darent motus pepigere profecto : 
Sed quia multa modis multis mutata per omne 
Ex: infinito vexantur percita plagis, 

Omne genus motus et coetus experiundo, 

Tandem deveniunt in tales disposituras, 

Qualibus haec rebus consistit summa creata. 


The theory of a jivine guidance of the affairs of nature was also expressly denied by 
Epicurus himself. Says Epicurus (ap. Diog. L., X. 76 seq.): “Τὸ must not be supposed 
that the motions of the stars, their rising and setting, their eclipses and the like, are 
effected and regulated, or that they have been once for all regulated by a being possessing 
at the same time complete blessedness and immortality; for labor and care and anger and 
favor are not compatible with happiness and self-sufficiency.” 

A world (κόσμος) is a section of the infinite universe, containing stars, an earth, and 
every variety of phenomena (περιοχή τις οὐρανοῦ, ἄστρα τε Kai γῆν Kai πάντα τὰ φαινόμενα 
περιέχουσα, ἀποτομὴν ἔχουσα ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀπείρου, Epic., ap. Diog. L., Χ. 88). The number 
of such worlds is infinite; they are not eternal ab initio, nor will they endure forever 
(ibid. 88, 89). 

The real and apparent magnitudes of the sun and the other heavenly bodies are the 
same; for if the effect of distance were to reduce (apparently) their (real) magnitude, the 
same must be true of their brilliancy, which nevertheless remains evidently undiminished. 
The gods of the popular faith exist, and are imperishable and blessed beings. We possess 
a distinct knowledge of them, for they often appear to men and leave behind representa- 
tive images (προλήψεις) in the mind. But the opinions of the mass of men respecting the 
gods are false assumptions (ὑπολήψεις ψευδεῖς), containing much that is incongruous with 
the idea of their immortality and blessedness (Epic., ap. Diog. L., X. 123 seq.; Cic., De 
Nat. Deor., I. 18 seq.). The gods are formed of the finest of atoms, and dwell in the void 
spaces between the different worlds (Cic., De Nat. Deor., 11. 23; De Div. 11. 11; Lucret., 
I. 59; IIL. 18 seq.; V. 147 seq.). The sage finds his motive for revering them, not in 
fear, but in admiration of their excellence. 

The Soul is defined by Epicurus (ap. Diog. L., X. 63) as a σῶμα λεπτομερὲς παρ᾽ ὅλον τὸ 
ἄθροισμα παρεσπαρμένον (see above, p. 206). It is most similar in nature to air; its atoms 
are very different from those of fire; yet in its composition a certain portion of warm 
substance is united with the aeriform. In death the atoms of the soul are scattered (Epic., 
ap. Diog. L., X. 64 seq.; Lucr., III. 418 seq.). After this resolution of the soul into its 
constituent atoms, sensation ceases; the cessation of which is death (στέρησις αἰσθήσεως). 
When death comes, we no longer exist, and so long as we exist, death does not come, 
so that for us death is of no concern (ὁ θάνατος οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς, Epic., ap. Diog. L., X. 
124 seq.; Lucret., III. 842 seq.). Nothing is immaterial except empty space, which can 
effect nothing; the soul, therefore, which is the agent of distinct operations, is material 
(Epic., ibid. X. 67). 

The doctrine of material effluxes from things and of images (eidwAa), which were sup- 
posed necessary to perception, was shared by Epicurus with Democritus. These images, 
types (τύποι), were represented as coming from the surface of things and making their way 
through the intervening air to the visual faculty or the understanding (εἰς τὴν ὄψιν ἢ τὴν 
διάνοιαν; Diog. L., X. 46-49; Epicurt fragm. libr. IT. et XI, de natura, Lucret., IV. 33 seq.). 

There is no fate (εἱμαρμένη) in the world. That which depends on us is not subject to 


208 THE EPICUREAN ETHICS. 


the influence of any external power (7d map’ ἡμῖν adéororov), and it is our power of free 
self-determination which makes us proper subjects of praise and blame (Epic., ap. Diog. L., 
X. 133; ef. Cic., Acad., ΤΙ. 30; De Fato, 10. 21; De Nat. Deorwm, I. 25). 

The interest of Epicurus in his natural philosophy turns essentially on the disproof of 
theological explanations and the establishment of the naturalistic principle, and not on the 
determination of completed scientific truth. 


§ 59. The Epicurean Ethics is founded on the Ethics of the Cyre- 
naics. In it the highest good is defined as happiness. Happiness, 
according to Epicurus, is synonymous with pleasure, for this is what 
every being naturally seeks to acquire. Pleasure may result either 
from motion or from rest. The former alone was recognized by the 
Cyrenaics ; but this pleasure, according to Epicurus, is only necessary 
when lack of it gives us pain. The pleasure of rest is freedom from 
pain. Pleasure and pain, further, are either mental or bodily. The 
more powerful sensations are not, as the Cyrenaics affirmed, bodily, 
but mental; for while the former are confined to the moment, the 
latter are connected with the past and future, through memory and 
hope, which thus increase the pleasure of the moment. Of the 
desires, some are natural and necessary, others natural but not ne- 
cessary, and still others neither natural nor necessary. Not every 


species of pleasure is to be sought after, nor is every pain to be . 


shunned; for the means employed to secure a certain pleasure are 
often followed by pains greater than the pleasure produced, or involve 
the loss of other pleasures, and that, whose immediate effect is pain- 
ful, often serves to ward off greater pain, or is followed by a pleas- 
ure more than commensurate with the pain immediately produced. 
Whenever a question arises as to the expediency of doing or omit- 
ting any action, the degrees of pleasure and pain which can be foreseen 
as sure to result, whether directly or indirectly, from the commission 
of the act, must be weighed and compared, and the question must be 
decided according to the preponderance of pleasure or pain in the 
foreseen result. The correct insight necessary for this comparison is 
the cardinal virtue. From it flow all other virtues. The virtuous 
man is not necessarily he who is in the possession of pleasure, but he 
who is able to proceed rightly in the quest of pleasure. But since the 
attainment of the highest possible amount of pleasure in connection 
with the smallest possible amount of pain, depends on a correct 
praxis, and since the latter, in turn, is dependent on correct insight, 
it follows that the virtuous man alone is able to attain the end de- 
scribed; on the other hand, the virtuous man will attain it without 


THE EPICUREAN ETHICS. 209 


failure. Virtue, then, is the only possible and the perfectly sure way 
to happiness. The sage, who as such possesses virtue, is consequently 
always happy. Duration of existence does not affect the measure of 
his happiness. 


The Moral Philosophy of the Epicureans is specially treated of by Des Contures (Paris, 1685, another 
edition. enlarged by Rondel, Hague, 1686), Batteux (Paris, 1758), and Garve (in connection with his transl. 
of Aristotle’s Ethies, Vol. I., Breslau, 1798, pp. 90-119): οἷς, also, E. Platner, Ueber die stoische und Epi- 
kureische Erkldrung vom Ursprung des Vergniigen, in the Neue Bibl. der schénen Wiss., Vol. 19. 


Epicurus’ own declarations respecting the principles of ethics may be read in Book X. 
of Diogenes L., especially in the letter from Epicurus to Menceceus (X. 122-135). Exact- 
ness in definition and rigid deduction do not there appear as arts in which Epicurus was 
pre-eminent. He utters his ideas loosely, in the order in which they occur to him, and with 
all the indeterminateness of uneiaborated thought. He takes no pains to be exact and 
systematic, his only aim being to provide rules of easy practical application. The principle 
of pleasure comes to view in the course of the progress of his discussion in the following 
terms (X. 128): ἡδονὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ τέλος λέγομεν εἶναι του μακαρίως ζῆν, and in defense of it 
Epicurus adds (X. 129), that in pleasure we are cognizant of the good which is first among 
all goods and congenial to our nature (ἀγαϑὸν πρῶτον καὶ συγγενικόν), the beginning of all our 
choosing and avoiding, and the end of all our action, sensation being the criterion by which 
we judge of every good. But previously to the formulation of this doctrine, many rules of 
conduct are given, the various species of desires are discussed, pleasure and freedom from 
pain are discoursed upon, and, in particular, the principle, by which we are to be guided 
in our acts of choice or avoidance, is defined (X. 128) as health and mental tranquillity 
(ἡ τοῦ σώματος ὑγίεια Kai ἡ τῆς ψυχῆς ἀταραξία), in which happiness becomes complete (ἐπεὶ 
τοῦτο τοῦ μακαρίως ζῆν ἐστὶ τέλος). ἸἘΡίουτιΒ nowhere states in the form of a definition 
what we are to understand by pleasure (ἡδονή), and what he says of the relation of posi- 
tive to negative pleasure (as the absence of pain) is very indefinite. In the letter referred 
to, after an exhortation to all men to philosophize in every period of life, to the end that 
fear may be banished and happiness (τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν) attained (X. 122), follows, first (123- 
127), instruction respecting the gods and respecting death, and then (127) a classification 
of desires (ἐπιθυμίαι). Of the latter, we are told that some are natural (φυσικαί), others 
empty (xevai). Of the natural desires, some are necessary (ἀναγκαῖαι), while the others 
are not necessary (φυσικαί μόνον). Those which are natural and necessary, are necessary 
either for our happiness (πρὸς εὐδαιμονίαν, which is obviously taken in a narrower sense 
than before), or for the preservation of the body in an untroubled condition (πρὸς τὴν τοῦ 
σώματος ἀοχλησίαν), or for life itself (πρὸς αὐτὸ τὸ ζῆν). (In another place, Diog. L., X. 
149, the desires are classified simply as either natural and necessary, or natural and not 
necessary, or neither natural nor necessary: desires of the first class aim at the removal 
of pain; those of the second at the diversification of pleasure; and those of the third at the 
gratification of vanity, ambition, and empty conceits generally. This classification is criti- 
cised with unjust severity by Cicero, De F.,II.ch.9.) Proper attention to these distine- 
tions, according to Epicurus (ap. Diog. L., X. 128), will lead to the right conduct of life, 
to health and serenity, and consequently to happiness (μακαρίως ζῆν). For, he continues, 
the object of all our actions is to prevent pain either of the body or of the mind (67% 
μήτε ἀλγῶμεν, μήτε ταρβῶμεν). We have need of pleasure (7dJov7) then, when its absenc 
brings us pain, and only then. Pleasure is, therefore, the starting-point and the end of 
happiness, (How the two statements: “Pleasure is the ethical principle” and “ We 

14 


210 THE EPICUREAN ETHICS. 


have need of it only when its absence brings us pain,” can be reconciled, or how one is 
the consequence of the other, it is difficult to say; for if really the end of all our action 
is only to secure our freedom from pain, and if we have no need of pleasure except 
when its absence would be painful, pleasure is obviously not an end but a means.) After 
the (above-given) brief justification of the hedonic principle (X. 129), Epicurus labors 
to disprove the mistaken idea that all kinds of pleasure are worthy to be sought after. 
He admits that every pleasure, without distinction, is a natural and therefore a good thing, 
and that every pain is an evil, but demands that, before deciding in favor of a given 
pleasure or against a certain pain, we weigh its consequences (συμμέτρησις), and that we 
then adopt or reject it according to the preponderance of pleasure or pain in the result. 
In the light of this principle, Epicurus then recommends, with special emphasis, modera- 
tion, the accustoming of one’s self to a simple manner of life, abstinence from costly and 
intemperate enjoyments, or, at most, only a rare indulgence in them, so that health may be 
preserved and the charm of pleasure may remain undiminished. To give greater force to 
his recommendations, he returns to the proposition, that the proper end of life is freedom 
from bodily and mental suffering (μήτε ἀλγεῖν κατὰ σῶμα, μήτε ταράττεσθαι κατὰ ψυχήν). 
Right calculation is the essence of practical wisdom, which is the highest result of phi- 
losophy and the source of all other virtues (Diog. L., X. 132). It is impossible to live 
agreeably (ἡδέως) without living prudently, decently, and uprightly (φρονίμως καὶ καλῶς 
καὶ δικαίως). Conversely, it is impossible that a life thus directed should not be at 
the same time an agreeable one; the virtues and pleasure grow together inseparably 
(συμπεφύκασιν ai ἀρεταὶ τῷ ζῆν ἡδέως, X. 132). Epicurus concludes his letter by portray- 
ing the happy life of the sage, who, concerning the gods, holds that opinion which is 
demanded by reason and piety, does not fear death, rightly values all natural goods, knows 
that there is no such thing as fate, but by his insight is raised above the contingencies of 
life, deeming it better to fail of his end in single instances after intelligent deliberation, 
than to be fortunate without intelligence (κρείττον εἶναι νομίζων εὐλογίςτως ἀτυχεῖν, ἢ 
ἀλογίστως εὐτυχεῖν), the man who, in one word, lives like a god among men in the enjoy- 
ment of immortal goods (X. 133-135). 

The Epicureans deny that the laws of ethics are innate in man, or that they were 
invented and violently imposed on him by his first rulers; on the contrary, they are the 
result of the judgment of eminent and leading men respecting what is useful (συμφέρον) to 
society (Hermarchus, ap. Porphyr., De Adstin., I. chs. 7-13; cf. Bernays, Theophr. Schrift 
tiber Frémmigkeit, Berlin, 1866, p. 8 seq.). 

Epicurus distinguishes (ap. Diog. L., X. 136) between two species of pleasure, viz.: the 
pleasure of rest, καταστηματικὴ ἡδονή (stabilitas voluptatis, Cic., De Fin., 11. 3), and the 
pleasure of motion, ἡ κατὰ κίνησιν ἡδονῇ (voluptas in motu, Cic., ibid.); the former is defined 
as freedom from trouble and labor (ἀταραξία καὶ arovia), the latter as joy and cheerfulness 
(χαρὰ καὶ εὐφροσύνη). In his conception of the ‘‘pleasure of rest,” Epicurus varies, some- 
times identifying the latter with the momentary satisfaction which arises from the removal 
of a pain, and sometimes with the mere absence of pain. This uncertainty is the more 
unfortunate, since the term ἡδονή (like voluptas and ‘pleasure”’) never receives in the 
ordinary usage the signification of absence of pain; Cicero’s severe censure (De Fin., II. 
2 seq.) of the carelessness and obscurity of Epicurus in the employment of this term is, 
therefore, not ungrounded. Yet Cicero’s account appears to be not wholly free from mis- 
apprehensions. Thus it can only be ascribed to an inexact apprehension of the doctrine of 
Epicurus, that Cicero should suppose that Epicurus identified the highest pleasure with 
the absence of pain as such (De Fin., I. 11; 11. 3 seq.); Epicurus (ap. Diog. L., X. 141) 
only says that the complete removal of pain is inseparably connected with the highest 


ὟΝ 
ΠΟ] 


THE EPICUREAN ETHICS. 911 


intensification of pleasure (for which, indeed, it would be more exact to say that the latter 
always involves the former, but not conversely). 

It would appear from the accounts of Cicero (De Fin., 1. 7 and 17; II. 30) that Epicu- 
rus derived all psychical pleasure from the memory of past or the hope of future corporeal 
pleasures. This doctrine is not to be found in any of the writings of Epicurus now at 
hand, and it is quite possible that in this point he has been misunderstood. Memory 
and hope are, indeed, according to Epicurus, the ground of the higher worth of psychical 
pleasure, but he can scarcely have taught that they were the only source of such pleasure. 
It is right to say only (according to Epicurus), that all psychical pleasure originates in one 
way or another in sensuous pleasure. In a letter quoted by Diog. L. (X. 22), Epicurus 
declares with reference to himself, that his bodily pains are outweighed in his old age by 
the pleasure which the recollection of his philosophical discoveries affords him. 

The alleged averment of Epicurus in his work περὶ τέλους (see Diog. L., X. 6), that he 
did not know what he should understand by the good, if senswous pleasures were taken 
away (ἀφαιρῶν μὲν τὰς διὰ χυλῶν ἡδονὰς, ἀφαιρῶν δὲ Kai τὰς δ ἀφροδισίων Kai τὰς δι’ ἀκροα- 
μάτων καὶ τὰς διὰ μορφῆς), is compatible not only with the doctrine that sensuous plea- 
sures are the only real ones, but also with the doctrine that they are the necessary basis 
of all other pleasures, so that with them all others would disappear. If we adopt the 
latter as the doctrine of Epicurus, the word ἀφαιρεῖν in the passage above quoted must 
not be understood in the Aristotelian sense, as denoting merely mental abstraction, but 
as signifying an attempt (of course only in thought) at real removal. In what manner 
intellectual pleasures are dependent on sensuous pleasures is left undetermined. 

Epicurus says expressly that no kind of pleasure deserves in itself to be rejected, 
though many a pleasure must be sacrificed on account of its consequences (Diog. L., X. 
141, cf. 142). The conception of a distinction in the worth of different pleasures, as 
determined by their quality, according to which the one pleasure could be termed refined, 
the other less refined, or unrefined, finds no place in the Epicurean system. Hence the 
conception of honor remains inexplicable in the Epicurean theory, and in the praxis of the 
Epicureans it was, so far as possible, placed in the background. It was these deficiencies 
that occasioned the most weighty and annihilating objections of Gicero (De Fin., 11.) 
against Epicureanism. Yet these causes also secured for the system its most extensive 
acceptation at the time, when the thirst for pleasure and despotism had broken down the 
antique sentiment of honor. 

In principle the Epicurean ethics is a system of egoism; for the advantage of the indi- 
vidual, which is treated as identical with the happiness of the individual, is required in 
all cases to furnish the law of action. Even Friendship is explained by this principle. 
Friendship, according to Epicurus, is the best means of assuring to man all the enjoyments 
of life. Some of the Epicureans (according to Cic., De Fin., I. 20) added to this two 
other theories of friendship, some asserting that it began in the idea of profit, which in 
the natural progress of friendly intercourse became changed into a sentiment of unselfish 
good-will, and others affirming that a covenant among the wise men bound them to love 
each his friend as himself. Epicurus himself is the author of the aphorism (ascribed to 
to him in Plutarch, Non Posse Suaviter Vivi sec. Epicurum, 15. 4): “It is more pleasant to 
do than to receive good” (τὸ εὖ ποιεῖν ἥδιον τοῦ πάσχειν). Yet through the great weight 
which, both in theory and in their actual life with each other, was laid by the Epicureans 
on friendship (a social development which only became possible after the dissolution of the 
bond which in earlier times had so closely united each individual citizen to the civil com- 
munity), Epicureanism aided in softening down the asperity and exclusiveness of ancient 
manners and in cultivating the social virtues of companionableness, compatibility, friendli- 


919 SKEPTICISM. 


ness, gentleness, beneficence, and gratitude, and so performed a work whose merit should 
not be underestimated. 

If we compare the Epicurean teaching with the Cyrenaic, we discover, along with their 
agreement in their general principle, the principle of Hedonism, two main differences (of 
which Diog. L. treats, X. 136, 137). The Cyrenaics posit only the positive pleasure which 
is connected with gentle motion (λεία κίνησις), where Epicurus posits not only this, but 
also the negative pleasure connected with repose (καταστηματικὴ ἡδονή). Farther, the 
Cyrenaics affirm that the worst pains are bodily, while Epicurus affirms them to be psy- 
chical, since the soul suffers from that which is past and from that which is to come; in 
like manner, to the former, bodily pleasure seems the greater; to the latter, psychical. 
The ethical teachings of the principal representatives of the Cyrenaic school after Aris- 
tippus were all incorporated into the Epicurean system. Thus Epicurus agreed with 
Theodorus that the ethical “end” was a general state rather than particular pleasures, 
with Hegesias, that the principal thing was to avert suffering, and with Anniceris, that 
the sage should zealously cultivate friendship. 

That by which Epicureanism is scientifically justified, is its endeavor to reach objective 
knowledge by rigidly excluding (or attempting to exclude) mythical forms and conceptions. 
Its deficiency lies in its restriction to those most elementary and lowest spheres of inves- 
tigation, in which alone, as things then were, knowledge having even the show of exact- 
ness and free from poetic and semi-poetic forms was possible, and in its explaining away 
whatever was not susceptible of scientific explanation in accordance with the insufficient 
hypotheses of the system. The indecisiveness of the struggle between Epicureanism and 
the more ideal philosophical schools, and the rise of Skepticism and Kclecticism, can be 
otherwise explained than by the hypothesis of an abatement of the desire for knowledge. 
They were rather (and to-day something of the same kind is being repeated) the natural 
result of the distribution of different advantages and deficiencies among these various 
schools: the idealistic philosophers sacrificed (as they still do to a great extent to-day), 
in many respects, scientific purity and rigor of form to an unconsciously poetical, or at 
least half-poetic, manner of apprehending the highest objects of knowledge; while Epi- 
cureanism (like all exclusively realistic systems), in its endeavor to present a perfectly clear 
and intelligible account of things on the principle of immanent natural causality, ignored 
largely the existence and importance of objects which were then incapable of explanation 
under a form so strictly scientific. Cf., further, respecting the significance of Epicu- 
reanism, the sections on this subject in A. Lange’s Gesch. des Materialismus, Iserlohn, 1866, 
and in his Newe Beitrige zur Gesch. des Materialismus, Winterthur, 1867. 


§ 60. The results of the great philosophical systems were not only 
reproduced or appropriated and developed in the schools which fol- 
lowed, but were subjected to a critical revision and re-examination, 
which led either to their being remodeled and blended together in 
new systems, or to doubt in regard to all of them and in regard to 
the cognoscibility of any thing, 7. ¢., to Eclecticism and Skepticism. 

There appeared in succession three Skeptical schools or groups of 
philosophers: 1) Pyrrho of Elis (in the time of Alexander the Great) 
and his earliest followers; 2) the so-called Middle Academy, or the 
second and third Academie Schools; 3) the Later Skeptics, beginning 
with Anesidemus, who again made the teaching of Pyrrho the basis 


SKEPTICISM. 213 


of their own teaching. The skepticism of the Middle Academy, 
issuing from the Platonic Dialectic, was less radical than that of the 
Pyrrhonists, since it was directed principally against a determinate 
form of doctrine, namely, against the dogmatism of the Stoics, and 
was at least so far from absolutely denying the possibility of knowl- 
edge, that it admitted the existence of probabilities, of which various 
degrees were distinguished. 

The earlier school of Skeptics, among whom, next to Pyrrho, 
Timon of Phlius, the Sillograph, was the most important, asserted that 
of every two mutually contradictory propositions, one was not more 
true than the other. They sought, by withholding their judgment in 
all cases, to secure peace of mind, and esteemed every thing except 
virtue indifferent. Among the later Skeptics, the most noteworthy 
was Ainesidemus, who went back to Pyrrho in philosophy, was the 
author of ten skeptical ‘ tropes,” and attempted, on the basis of Skep- 
ticism, to revive the philosophy of Heraclitus. Beside him we may 
mention, in particular, Agrippa, who reduced the ten tropes to five, 
Favorinus, who seems to have wavered between the Academic and 
the Pyrrhonic form of doubt, and Sextus, who belonged to the em- 
pirical school of physicians, and composed the works, still extant, 
entitled “ Pyrrhonic Sketches” and “ Against the Dogmatists.” 

Of the Skepticism of Pyrrho treat Joh. Arrhenius (Ups. 1708), G. Ploucquet (Tiib. 1758), Kindervater 
(An P. doctr. omnis tollatur virtus, Leipsic, 1789), J. G. Minch (De Notione atque Indole Scepticismi, 
nominatim Pyrrhonismi, Altd. 1796), R. Brodersen (De philos. Pyrrhonis, Kiel, 1819), J. R. Thorbecke 
(Quid inter academ. et scept. interf., Leyden, 1821); on Timon, see Jos. F. Langheinrich (Diss. tres de 
Timone sillographo, ace. ejusdem fragmenta, Leips. 1720-24), and, of more recent writers, Wachsmuth (De 
Timone Phiiasio ceterisque sillographis Graecis, Leips. 1859); οἷ, respecting the general subject of Sidloi 
among the Greeks, Franz Anton Wélke (Warschau, 1820), and Friedr. Paul (Berlin, 1821). Fragments of 
the writings of Timon are found in the Anthology published by F. Jacobs, from the Palatine Codex (Leips. 
1818-17). Cf. Ὁ. Zimmermann, Darstellung der Pyrrh. Ph., Ἐπ]. 1841; Ueber Urspr. u. Bedeutung der 
Pyrrh. Ph., ib. 1843; Commentatio, qua Timonis Phliasii sillorum reliquiae a Secto Empirico traditae 
explanantur (G.-Pr,), tb. 1865. Saisset treats of Ainesidemus, in Le Scepticisme: Aenésidéme, Pascal, 
Kant, 2d ed., Paris, 1867. 

For the literature relating to the Middle Academy, see above, § 44, p. 184. For the editions of the two 
works of Sextus Empiriens (Pyrrhon. Institut. Libr. IT1., and Contra Mathematicos Libri X1.), see above, 
§7,p.21. Cf. L. Kayser, Ueber Sextus Empir. Schrift πρὸς λογικούς, in the Rhein. Mus. 7. Ph., uew 
series, VIT. 1850, pp. 161-190; C. Jourdain, ὅρα, Empir. et la Philosophie Scolastique, Paris, 1858. 


Of. Tafel, Gesch. des Skepticismus, Tibingen, 1834; Norman Maccoll, The Greek Skeptics from Pyrrho 
to Sextus, London and Cambridge, 1869. 


Pyrrho of Elis (about 360-270 B. 6.) is said (Diog. L., IX. 61, ef. Sext. Emp. Adv. Math., 
VII. 13) to have been a pupil of Bryso (or Dryso), who was a son and disciple of Stilpo; 
yet this statement is very doubtful, since Bryso, if he was really a son of Stilpo, must have 
been younger than Pyrrho; according to other accounts, Bryso was a disciple of Socrates 
or of Euclid of Megara, Socrates’ disciple. Perhaps this Bryso, disciple of Socrates, was the 
Bryso of Heraclea, from whose dialogues, according to Theopompus, ap. Athenzus, X1. 
p. 508, Plato was said to have borrowed considerably (perhaps, in particular, in the Theae- 


914 SKEPTICISM. 


= 


tetus?). He seems to have thought highly of the doctrines of Democritus, but to have hated 
most other philosophers, regarding them as Sophists (Diog. L., 1X. 67 and 69). He accom- 
panied Anaxarchus, the Democritean, of the suite of Alexander the Great, on his military 
campaigns, as far as India. He became of the opinion, that nothing was beautiful or hate- 
ful, just or unjust, in reality (τῇ ἀληθείᾳ, Diog. L., IX. 61, for which we find φύσει, ib. 101, 
and in Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., XI. 140); in itself every thing was just as much and just 
as little (οὐδὲν μᾶλλον) the one as the other; every thing depended on human institution 
and custom. Hence Pyrrho taught that real things were inaccessible to human knowledge 
or incomprehensible (ἀκαταληψία), and that it was our duty to abstain from judging (é7077). 
The external circumstances of human life are all indifferent (ἀδιάφορον) ;*it becomes the 
wise man, whatever may befall him, always to preserve complete tranquillity of mind, and 
to allow nothing to disturb his equanimity (ἀταραξία, Diog. L., IX. 61, 62, 66-68; cf. 
Cic., De Fin., II. 13; III. 3 and 4; IV. 16: Pyrrho, qui virtute constituta, nihil omnino 
quod appetendum stt, relinquat). The Pyrrhonists were termed (according to Diog. L., IX. 
69) doubters (ἀπορητικοί), skeptics (σκεπτικοί), suspenders of judgment (ἐφεκτεκοῦ, and 
inquirers (ζητητικοί)δ. Pyrrho himself developed his views only orally (Diog. L., Proem, 16; 
ΙΧ. 102). It was thus easy for his name to become a typical one, and for many views to 
be ascribed to him bv later disciples and writers, which were only the views of the school. 
The most correct reports of his doctrines are those which are derived from the writings of 
Timon, his disciple (termed by Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., 1. 53: ὁ προφήτης τῶν Πύῤῥωνος 
λόγων). 

As immediate disciples of Pyrrho, Diog. L. (IX. 67, 69) names, among others, Philo of 
Athens, Nausiphanes of Teos, the Democritean, who afterward became a teacher of Epi- 
curus, and, as the most eminent of all, Timon of Phlius. Timon (born about 325, diea 
about 235 B. c.), whom (according to Diog. L., 1X. 109) Stilpo, the Megarian, had instructed 
before Pyrrho, was the author of satirical poems, Σίλλοι, in three books, in which he 
treated and reviled as babblers all the Greek philosophers, except Xenophanes, who, he 
said, had sought for the real truth, disengaged from useless subtleties, and Pyrrho, who 
found it. In opposition to the assertion, that the truth was known through the co-opera- 
tion of the senses and the intellect, Timon, who held both to be deceptive, repeated the 
verse: ‘‘Attagas and Numenius” (two notorious cheaters) ‘‘came together” (συνῆλθεν 
᾿Ατταγᾶς τε καὶ Novufvioc). According to Aristocles (ap. Euseb., Praepar. Evang., XIV. 18), 
Timon appears to have developed the main thesis of skepticism in the following manner : 
He who would attain to happiness must consider three things: 1) the nature of things, 
2) how we are to conduct ourselves with reference to them, 3) the (theoretical and prac- 
tical) result flowing from this conduct. There exist no fixed differences among things; all 
things are unstable and can not be judged of by us. Owing to the instability of things our 
perceptions and representations are neither true nor false, and can therefore not be relied 
upon. Adopting this view, we become non-committal (we decide, say nothing) or free 
from all theoretical bias (ἀφασία), and thus secure imperturbableness of mind (ἀταραξία). 
This state of mind follows our suspension of judgment (ἐποχῇ) as its shadow (σκιᾶς τρόπον, 
Diog. L., IX. 107). The subject of doubt is not what appears (the phenomenon), but what 
is. Says Timon (ap. Diog., IX. 105): “That a thing is sweet I do not affirm, but only 
admit that it appears so.” In his work entitled Πύθων, Timon (according to Diog. L., IX. 
76) explained his expression, οὐδὲν μᾶλλον, as equivalent to μηδὲν ὁρίζειν or ἀπροσθετεῖν (we 
determine nothing and assent to nothing). The grounds for every proposition and its 
contradictory opposite show themselves equally strong (ἰσοσθένεια τῶν λόγων). Another 
expression for the skeptical withholding of one’s judgment 1s ἀῤῥεψία, or equilibrium 
(ibid, 74). The οὐδὲν μᾶλλον is intended by the Skeptics to be taken, not in the positive 


SKEPTICISM. 915 


sense of asserting real equality, but only in a privative sense (ov θετικῶς, ἀλλ᾽ avarpeTixac), 
as when it is said, ‘ Scylla exists no more than the Chimera,” 7. ¢., neither exists (éd. 75). 
All these principles, after being first applied against the assertions of the dogmatists, 
were finally to be applied to themselves, in order that in the end not even these prin- 
ciples should retain the character of fixed assertions; just as every other λόγος, or asser- 
tion, could be met by a contradictory assertion, so also could these (ib., 76, given, apparently, 
as an affirmation of Timon). In this position, obviously, Skepticism, carrying its own prin- 
ciple to the extreme, at last destroys itself; besides, the Skeptics, while arguing against the 
force of logical forms, could not but employ them themselves, thus conceding to them in 
fact the force which their theory denied them (except, of course, in so far as the employ- 
ment of them from the Skeptical stand-point was declared to be merely hypothetical, and 
intended merely to show that if they were valid they might be turned against themselves, 
and were thus self-destructive). 

The later Skeptics, who styled themselves Pyrrhonists, were accustomed to define the 
difference between the members of the Middle Academy (see above, § 44) and the Pyrrho- 
nistic doubters, by saying that the Academics of the schools of Arcesilas and Carneades 
asserted that they knew only one thing, viz.: that nothing was knowable, while the Pyr- 
rhonists denied even this one supposed certainty (Sext. Emp., Hypotyp. Pyrrhon., I. 3, 226, 
233; ef. Gell., N. A., XI. 5,8). But this appreciation is incorrect in what concerns the 
Academics; for neither Arcesilas (Cic., Acad. Post., I. 12, 45) nor Carneades (Cic., Acad. 
Pr., II. 9, 28) ascribed to the theses of Skepticism complete certainty. It is correct only 
to say, in general, that the Skepticism of the Academics was less radical than that of the 
Pyrrhonists, but not for the reason above cited, but because it admitted a theory of proba- 
bility (against which Sext. Emp. contends, Adv. Math., VII. 435 seq.), and, in what con- 
cerns Arcesilas, because this philosopher (according to Sext. Emp., Hyp. Pyrrh., 1. 234, 
and others) employed his method of negative criticism only as a preliminary to the com- 
munication of Plato’s teachings (provided, for the rest, that this statement is exact or 
referred to the right person). There existed besides a very important difference between 
the Academic and the Pyrrhonic Skeptics, in that the latter only, and not the Academics, 
saw in ataraxy the supreme end of philosophy. 

After that the Academy (in the persons of Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, 
and their successors) had gone over to an eclectic dogmatism, the Skeptical doctrine of 
Pyrrho was renewed, especially by Ainesidemus. /Enesidemus of Cnossus appears to 
have taught at Alexandria in the first century after Christ. He wrote Πυῤῥωνείων λόγων 
ὀκτὼ βιβλία (Diog. L., IX. 116), of which Photius (Bibl. cod., 212) prepared an abridgment, 
which is still extant, but is very brief. His stand-point is not that of pure Skepticism, 
since he proposed, by the employment of the skeptical principle, to lay the foundation for 
a renewed Heraclitism. He proposed (according to Sext. Emp., Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 210) to 
show first that contradictory predicates appeared to be applicable to the same thing, in 
order to break the ground for the doctrine that such predicates were in reality thus appli- 
cable. With him doubt was not doctrinal, but directive (ἀγωγή). The ten ways (τρόποι) 
of justifying doubt, which, according to Sext. Empir., Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 36, were traditional 
among the earlier Skeptics (παρὰ τοῖς ἀρχαιοτέροις σκεπτικοῖς), appear to have been first 
enumerated in his work, and not in that of Timon; Sextus treats Agrippa as the first of 
the ‘‘ Later Skeptics.” The ten tropes (otherwise termed λόγοι or τόποι) were, according 
to Sext. Empir. (Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 36 seq.) and Diog. L. (IX. 79 seq.) severally as follows: 
The first was derived from the different constitution of the various classes of animated 
beings, resulting in differences in their modes of apprehending the same objects, of which 
modes it was impossible to decide which, if either, was correct; the second was drawm 


210 SKEPTICISM. 


from the different constitution o. different men, whence the same result as before; the 
third, from the different structure of the several organs of sense; the fourth, from the 
variability of our physical and mental conditions; the fifth, from the diversities of appear- 
ance due to position, distance, and place; the sixth, from the fact that no object can be 
perceived by itself alone, apart from all others; the seventh, from the various appearance 
of objects as determined by quantity, size of parts, and the like; the eighth, from the gen- 
eral relativity of all our knowledge (and this, as is correctly remarked by Sext. Empir. 
[Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 39; ef. Gell., XI. 5, 7], is the substance of all skeptical tropes); the ninth, 
from the variations in our notions of objects, according as we perceive them more or less 
frequently; and the tenth, from diversities of culture, customs, laws, mythical notions, and 
philosophical theories. 

The later Skeptics, beginning with Agrippa (the fifth successor of Ainesidemus), and in- 
cluding Sextus, the empirical, or, as he preferred to be called (see Hyp. Pyrrh., I. 236 seq. ; 
Adv. Math., VIII. 327), the methodical physician (about 200 A. D.), and his pupil Saturninus 
(Diog. L., IX. 116), and others (with whom, among others, Favorinus of Arelate, the gram- 
marian and antiquarian, who lived at Rome and Athens under Hadrian, and was the teacher 
of A. Gellius, seems to have agreed), enumerated, as reasons for “éroy#,” or the suspen- 
sion of judgment, five tropes (see Sext. Emp., Hyp. Pyrr., I. 164 seq.; Diog. L., IX. 88 seq.). 
The first of these was founded on the discrepancy of human opinions respecting the same 
objects ; the second pointed to the regress in infinitum involved in proof, since whatever is 
proved, is proved by that which itself needs proof, and so on without end; the third was 
taken from the relativity of things, all of which vary in appearance according to the con- 
stitution of the percipient and according to their relations to other things with which they 
are combined; the fourth called attention to the arbitrariness of the fundamental prin- 
ciples of the dogmatists, who, in order to avoid the regressus in infinitum, set out in their 
proofs from some pre-supposition, whose truth they illegitimately assumed; the fifth 
pointed out the usual circle in demonstration, where that on which the proof rests must 
itself be established by that which is to be proved. According to Sext. Empir., Hyp. 
Pyrrh., 1. 178 seq., still later Skeptics maintained the two following tropes: 1) Nothing 
is certain of itself, as is proved by the discrepancy of opinions concerning all that is per- 
ceptible or thinkable; and, therefore, 2) nothing can be made certain by proof, since the 
latter derives no certainty from itself, and, 1f based on other proof, leads us either to a 
regressus in infinitum, or to a circle in demonstration. 

To disprove the possibility of demonstration, Sextus advanced a series of arguments, of 
which the most noticeable was this (Hyp. Pyrrh., 11. 134 seq.), that every syllogism moves 
in a circle, since the major premise, on which the proof of the conclusion depends, depends 
for its own certainty on a complete induction, in which the conclusion must have been 
already contained. (Cf. Hegel, Log., II. p. 151 seq.; Encycl., § 190 seq., and the remarks 
in my System of Logic, under § 101.) 

Of special interest and importance are the skeptical arguments against the validity of 
the notion of causality, reported, apparently after Aunesidemus, in Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., 
IX. 207 seq. A cause is a relativwm, for it is not to be conceived without that which it 
causes ; but the relative has no existence (οὐχ ὑπάρχει) except in thought (ἐπενοεῖται μόνον). 
Further, in each case cause and effect must be either synchronous, or the former must pre- 
cede or follow the latter. They can not be synchronous, for then cause and effect would 
as such be indistinguishable, and each could with equal reason be claimed as the cause 
of the other. Nor can the cause precede its effect, since a cause is no cause until that 
exists of which it is the cause. Lastly, the supposition that the cause follows its effect 
is without sense, and may be abandoned to those fools who habitually invert the natural 


EOLECTICISM.—CICERO.—THE SEXTIANS. 217 


order of things. Other arguments against causality are also adduced by Sextus; the 
characteristic fact in connection with them is that that argument is not included among 
them, which in modern times (since Hume) has had most weight, namely, that the origin 
of the notion of causality can not be so accounted for, as to justify our relying upon it as 
a form of cognition. (Cf. Zeller, Ph. d. Gr., 1st ed., III. p. 474; 2d ed., III. Ὁ, p. 38 seq.) 

Theology, also, and especially the Stoic doctrine of providence, were among the objects 
of Skeptical attack in the later period of Skepticism. The arguments employed in this 
connection were derived especially from Carneades (Sext. Empir., Adv. Math., IX. 137 seq.: 
Hyp. Pyrrh., 111. 2 seq.), and were drawn principally from the evil in the world, which God 
either could not or would not prevent, both of which suppositions were incompatible with 
the idea of God. Yet the Skeptics explained that their intention was not to destroy the 
belief in the existence of gods, but simply to combat the arguments and the pretended 
knowledge of the dogmatic philosophers. 


§ 61. A tendency, more or less decided, toward Eclecticism, is 
manifest in all the dogmatic philosophy of the later portion of an- 
tiquity, and especially in the period of the propagation of Greek 
philosophy in the Roman world. The most important and influen- 
tial representative of this tendency is Cicero, who, in what pertains 
to the theory of cognition, confessed his adhesion to the skepticism of 
the Middle Academy, took no interest in physics, and in ethics 
wavered between the Stoic and the Peripatetic doctrines. 

The school of the Sextians, who flourished for a short time at 
Rome, about the beginning of the Christian era, seems to have ocen- 
pied a position intermediate between Pythagoreanism, Cynicism, and 
Stoicism. 


Edward Zeller (in No. 24 of the first series of the Sammlung gemeinverstindlicher wiss. Vortrige, ed. 
by Rud. Virchow and Fr. v. Holtzendorf, Berlin, 1866) treats of religion and philosophy among the Romans. 

Among the earlier treatises on the philosophy of Cicero may be mentioned those of Jason de Nores 
(Cie. Philos, de Vita et Moribus, Padua, 1597), Ant. Bucher (Zthica Ciceroniana, Hamb. 1610), J. C. Wal- 
din (De philosophia Ciceronis Platonica, Jena, 1753), Chr. Meiners (Orat. de philos. Ciceronis, ejusque 
in universam philos. meritis, in his Verm. philos. Schr., Vol. 1., 1175, p. 274 seq.), H. Ὁ, F. Htilsemann 
(De indole philosophica Ciceronis, Liineb. 1799), Gedike’s Collation of those passages in Cicero which 
relate to the history of philosophy (Berlin, 1782, 1801, 1814)—which is more valuable as an exposé of Cicero’s 
philosophical conceptions, than as a contribution to the history of philosophy—and the annotations and dis- 
cussions appended by Christian Garve to his translation of the De Oficiis (Breslau, 1783, 6th ed., ἐδ. 1819), 
as also Krische’s Forschungen (Gott. 1840, see above, p. 23) and Ritter’s minute exposition of the phi- 
losophy of Cicero in his Gesch. der Philos., ΤΥ. pp. 106-176 [Morrison’s English translation of R.’s Hist. of 
Philos., London, 1846, Vol. 1V., pp. 99-160.—7r.] More reeent works worthy of mention are those of J. F. 
Herbart (Ueber die Philos. des Cic., Werke, Vol. X11, pp. 167-182), Kari Salom, Zachariae (Staatswissen- 
schaftliche Betrachtungen tiber Cicero's wiedergefundenes Werk vom Staate, Heidelb. 1828), Lotheisen 
(Cicero's Grundsdtze und Beurtheilung des Schénen, Brieg, 1825), Raph. Kihner (If. Tulit Ciceronis in 
philosophiam ejusque partes merita, Hamburg, 1825), J. A.C. van Heusde (Jf. Tullius Cicero φιλοπλάτων, 
Traj. ad Rhen. 1836), Banmhauer (De Aristotelia vi in Cie. scriptis, Utrecht, 1841), C. Ἐς Hermann (De 
tnterpretatione Timaei dialogi a Cic. relicta, Progr., Gott. 1842), J. Klein (De fontibus Topicorum Cice- 
ronis, Bonn, 1844), Legeay (M. Tullius Cicero philosophiae historicus, Leyden, 1846), C. Crome (Quid 
Graecis Cicero in philosophia, quid sibi debuerit, G.-Pr., Disseldorf, 1855), Havestadt (De Οἷς. primis 
principiis philosophiae moralis, G.-Pr., Emmerich, 1857), A. Desjardins (De setentia civili apud Cic., 
Beauvais, 1857), Burmeister (Cic. als Neu-Akademiker, G.-Pr., Oldenburg, 1860), Hfig (Cicero's Ansicht 
von der Staatsreligion, G.-Pr., Krotoschin, 1863), C. M. Bernhardt (De Cicerone Graecae philosophia 


918 ECLECTICISM.—CICERO.—THE SEXTIANS. 


interprete, “ Progr.’ of the Fr.-Wilh.-Gymn., Berlin, 1865), Ἐς, Hasler (Ueber das Verhidliniss der heid. 
nischen und christlichen Ethik auf Grund einer Vergleichung des Ciceronianischen Buches De Officiia 
mit dem gleichnamnigen des heiligen Ambrosius, Munich, 1866), G. Barzelotti (Delle dottrine filosofiche 
nei Libri di Vicerone, Florence, 1867), J. Walter (De An. Immort. quae praec. Cie. trad., Prague, 1867), 
G. Zietschmann (De Tuse. qu. fontibus, Diss., Halle, 1868). The inaugural dissertation of Hugo Jentsch 
(Aristotelis ex arte rhetorica quaeritur quid habeat Cicero, Berlin, 1866) contains noteworthy contribu 
tions to the solution of the question, to what extent Cicero had read and understood Aristotle. 

On the philosopher Sextius, see De Burigny (Mlemoires de [ Acad. des Inseript., XXXI.), Lasteyrif 
(Sentences de Sewtius, Paris, 1842), and Meinrad Ott (Character und Ursprung der Spriiche des Philoso: 
phen Sextius, G.-Pr., Rottweil, 1861, and Die syrischen “auserlesenen Spriiche des Herrn Xistus, 
Bischofs von Rom.” nicht eine Xistusschrift, sondern eine tiberarbeitete Sextiusschrift, G.-Pr., Rottweit 
and Tibingen, 1862 and 1863), 


When criticism had demonstrated the presence of untenable elements in all the great 
systems, the ineradicable need of philosophical convictions could not but lead either to 
the construction of new systems or to Keclecticism. In the latter it would necessarily 
end, if the philosophizing subject retained a naive confidence in his own “ Unbefangenheit,”’ 
7. e., in the directness of his natural perceptions of truth or in his sagacious tact in the ap- 
preciation of philosophical doctrines, while yet lacking the creative power requisite to the 
founding of a system. In particular, Eclecticism would naturally find acceptance with 
those who sought in philosophy not knowledge as such, but rather a general theoretical 
preparation for practical life and the basis of rational convictions in religion and morals, 
and for whom, therefore, rigid unity and systematic connection in philosophical thought 
were not unconditionally necessary. Hence the philosophy of the Romans was almost 
universally eclectic, even in the case of those who professed their adhesion to some one of 
the Hellenic systems. The special representative of Eclecticism is Cicero. 

M. Tullius Cicero (Jan. 3d, 106—Dece. 7th, 43 B. 6.) pursued his philosophical studies 
especially at Athens and Rhodes. In his youth, he heard, first, Pheedrus the Epicurean 
and Philo the Academic, and was also instructed by Diodotus the Stoic (who was after- 
ward, with Tyrannio, an inmate of his house, Tusc., V. 39, Epist., passim). He after- 
ward heard Antiochus of Askalon, the Academic, Zeno the Epicurean, and lastly (at 
Rhodes), Posidonius the Stoic. In his latter years Cicero turned his attention again to 
philosophy, especially during the last three years of his life. Tusc., V. 2: Philosophiae 
in sinum quum a primis temporibus aetatis nostra voluntas studiumque nos compulisset, his 
gravissimis casibus in eundem portum, ex quo eramus egressi magna jactati tempestate con- 
JSugimus. 

Cicero gives a list of his philosophical writings in De Div., 11. 1. In his work entitled 
Hortensius, he had, as he here says, urged the study of philosophy; in the Academics he 
had indicated what he considered the most modest, consequent, and elegant mode of phi- 
losophizing (namely, that pursued by the Middle Academy); in the five books De Finibus 
Bonorum et Malorum he had treated of the foundation of ethics, the doctrine of the highest 
good, and of evil, after which he had written the five books of Tusculan Disputations, in 
which he had shown what things were necessary to the greatest happiness in life; then 
had followed the three books De Natura Deorum, to which were to be joined the then 
unfinished work De Divinatione and the projected work De Falo. Among his philosophical 
works were also to be reckoned the six books De Republica (previously composed) and the 
works entitled Consolatio and De Senectute ; to these might be added his rhetorical writings : 
the three books De Oratore, and Brutus (De Claris Oratoribus), constituting a fourth, and 
the Orator, constituting a fifth book on the same general topic. 

Cicero composed the work De ep. (in six books) in the years 54-52 B.c. About the 
third part of it has come down to us, most of which was first published by A. Mai, from 


ECLECTICISM.—CICERO.—THE SEXTIANS. 219 


the Palimpsest in the Vatican (Rome, Ist ed., 1822); a part of Book VI., the dream of 
Scipio, is preserved in Macrobius. Complementary to this work was the De Legibus, 
begun in 52 B. c., but never finished, and now extant only in a fragmentary form. Pos- 
sibly as early as the beginning of the year 46 B. c., but perhaps later, Cicero wrote the 
small work called Paradoxa, which is not mentioned by him in De Div., Il. 1. The Con- 
solatio and Hortensius were composed in 45 B. c., of both of which only a few fragments 
remain to us; in the same year the Academics (now incomplete) and the De Finibus (which 
we possess entire) were written, and the T'usculan. Disp. and the De Nat. Deor. were begun; 
the two last-named works were not completed till the following year. The date of the 
Cato Major sive De Senectute falls in the beginning of 44 8. c.; that of the De Divinatione 
(above-cited, intended as a complement to the work on the Nature of the Gods) falls in the 
same year, as also do the De Fato (which has not come down to us entire), the lost work 
De Gloria, and the extant works: Laelius s. De Amicitia and De Officiis; the treatise De 
Virtutibus (not extant) was probably composed immediately after the De Offciis. Among 
the youthful works of Cicero were the translations (now lost) of Xenophon’s Gconomicus 
and Plato’s Proiagoras (which latter was still existing in the times of Priscianus and Dona- 
tus); but his translation of Plato’s Timaeus, of which a considerable fragment is preserved, 
was written, after the Academica, in 45 (or 44) B.c. Of the rhetorical works, which are 
classed by Cicero himself with his philosophical works, the De Oratore was written in the 
year 55, and Brutus and the Orator in 46 B. Cc. 

That Cicero in his philosophical writings depended on Grecian sources appears from 
his own confession, since he says of the former (Ad Atticuwm, XII. 52): ἀπόγραφα sunt, 
minore labore fiunt, verba tantum affero, quibus abundo (yet cf. De Fin., 1. 2.6; 3.7; De Off, 
I. 2. 6, where Cicero alleges his relative independence). It is still possible to point out the 
foreign sources of most of his writings (generally by the aid of passages in these writings 
themselves or in Cicero’s Epistles). The works De Rep. and De Legibus are in form imita- 
tions of the works of Plato bearing the same names; their contents are founded partly on 
Cicero’s own political experiences and partly on Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines, 
and, to a not inconsiderable extent, on the writings of Polybius. The Paradosa discuss cer- 
tain well-known Stoic principles. The Consolatio is founded on Crantor’s work περὶ πένβους, 
the (lost) Hortenstus, probably on the Προτρεπτικός, which Aristotle had addressed to Themi- 
son, king in one of the cities of Cyprus (see Bernays, Die Dialoge des Arist., p. 116 seq.), or, it 
may be, onthe Protrepticus of Philo of Larissa, the Academic (see Krische, Ueber Cicero's Aca- 
demica, Gott. Studien, I1., 1845, p. 191); the De Finibus (the best of the extant philosophical 
writings of Cicero), on the works of Pheedrus, Chrysippus, Carneades, Antiochus, as also 
on the results of the studies pursued by Cicero in his youth, when he listened to lectures 
and engaged in philosophical discussions; the Academica, on the writings and in part also 
on the discourses of the more distinguished of the Academies ; the Tusc. Disp., on the works 
of Plato and Crantor, and on Stoic and Peripatetic writings; the first book of the De Natura 
Deorum, on an Epicurean work, which has been discovered in the Herculanean Rolls, and 
was at first considered to be a treatise of Phiedrus περὶ θεῶν, but has now been recognized 
as the work of Philodemus περὶ εὐσεβείας ; Cicero's critique of the Epicurean stand-point is 
founded on a work by Posidonius the Stoic; the second book of the De Nat. Deor. is founded 
particularly on the works of Cleanthes and Chrysippus; the third, on those of Carneades 
and Clitomachus, the Academics; the first of the two books De Divinatione is based on 
Chrysippus’ work περὶ χρησμῶν, on the περὶ μαντικῆς of Posidonius, and on works com- 
posed by Diogenes and Antipater; the second book, on the works of Carneades and of 
Panetius the Stoic; the treatise De Fato, on writings of Chrysippus, Posidonius, Cleanthes, 
and Carneades; and the Cato Major, on writings of Plato. Xenophon, Hippocrates, and 


220 ECLECTICISM.—CICERO.—THE SEXTIANS. 


Aristo of Chius. The Laelius of Cicero reposes especially npon the work of Theophrastus 
on Friendship, and also on the Ethics of Aristotle and the writings of Chrysippus; the two 
first books of the De Officiis were drawn principally from Panetius; the third, from Posi- 
donius; but besides the writings of these men, those of Plato and Aristotle, and also those 
of the Stoics, Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tyre, and Hecato, were employed in the 
composition of the De Officiis. 

From Skepticism, which Cicero was unable scientifically to refute, and to which he was 
ever being invited by the conflict of philosophical authorities, he was disposed to take 
refuge in the immediate certainty of the moral consciousness, the consensus gentiwm and the 
doctrine of innate ideas (notiones innatae, natura nobis insitae). Characteristic are such decla- 
rations as the following from the De Legibus, 1. 13: Perturbatricem autem harum omniwm 
rerum Academiam hanc ab Arcesila et Carneade recentem exoremus ut sileat, nam si invaserit 
in haec, quae satis scite nobis instructa et composita videntur, nimias edet ruinas; quam quidem 
ego placare cupio, submovere non audeo. In physics Cicero does not advance beyond the 
stadium of doubt; still he regards the field of physical investigation as furnishing agreeable 
‘‘pastime ” for the mind, and one not to be despised (Acad., 11. 41). That which most inter- 
ests him in natural science is its relation to the question of God’s existence. The following 
noticeable passage is directed against atheistic atomism (De Nat. Deor., 11. 37): Hoe (viz., 
the formation of the world by an accidental combination of atoms) qui existimat fiert potuisse, 
non intelligo cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formae litterarum vel aureae 
vel guales libet aliquo conjiciantur, posse ex his in terram excussis annales Ennii, ut deinceps 
legi possint, effici. Cicero would have mythology purged of every thing unworthy of the 
gods (the story of the abduction of Ganymede, for example, Tusc., 1. 26; IV. 33), but 
would, as far as possible, hold fast to that in which the beliefs of different peoples agree 
(Tusc., I. 13); he is particularly attached to the belief in providence and immortality (Tusc., 
I. 1. 2 seq.; 49 e¢ al.), but is not altogether free from uncertainty on these subjects, and 
with dispassionate impartiality allows the Academic philosopher, in his De Natura Deorum, 
to develop the grounds of doubt with the same minuteness and thoroughness with which 
the Stoic develops his arguments for dogmatism. Cicero defines the morally good (honestum) 
as that which is intrinsically praiseworthy (De Fin., 11. 14; De Of., I. 4), im accordance 
with the etymology of the word, which to him, the Roman, represents the Greek καλόν. 
The most important problem in ethics with him is the question whether virtue is alone 
sufficient to secure happiness. He is inclined to answer this question, with the Stoics, 
in the affirmative, though the recollection of his own weakness and of the general frailty 
of mankind often fills him with doubts; but then he reproaches himself for judging of 
the power of virtue, not by its nature, but by our effeminacy (Tusc., V. 1). Cicero is not 
altogether disinclined (De Fin., V. 26 seq.) to the distinction made by Antiochus of Aska- 
lon between the vita beata, which is made sure under 811 circumstances by virtue, and the 
vita beatissima, to which external goods are necessary, although he entertains ethical and 
logical scruples respecting it, and elsewhere (Tusc., V. 13) rejects it; but he contents him- 
self with the thought that all which is not virtue, whether it deserves the name of a good 
or not, is at all events vastly inferior to virtue in worth, and is of vanishing consequence in 
comparison with it (De Fin., V. 32; De Of:, 111. 3). From this point of view the difference 
between the Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines sinks, in his view, to a mere difference of words, 
which Carneades (according to Cic., De Fin., 11]. 12) had already declared it to be. Cicero 
is more decided in opposing the Peripatetic doctrine, that virtue requires the reduction of 
the πάθη (translated by Cicero perturbationes) to their right proportions; he demands, with 
the Stoies, that the sage should be without πάθη. But he makes his demonstration easier, 
by including in the concept πάθος (perturbatio) the mark of faultiness (Tusc., V. 6: aversa a 








ECLECTICISM.—CICERO.—THE SEXTIANS. 221 


recta ratione animi commotio), so that, in fact, he only proves what is self-evident, viz.: that 
that which is faulty 15 not to be suffered; but he misses the real point in dispute (Tusc., 
IV. 17 seq.). In another particular, also, he stands on the side of the Stoics, namely, in 
regarding practical virtue as the highest virtue. Cf. De Off, I. 44: omne offieium, quod 
ad conjunctionem hominum et ad societatem tuendam valet, anteponendum est uli officio, 
quod cognitione et scientia continetur. Ib., 45: agere considerate pluris est, quam cogitara 
prudentur. 

Cicero's political ideal is a government made up of monarchical, aristocratic, and demo- 
cratic elements. He finds it realized approximately in the Roman state (De Rep., I. 29; 
11. 23 seq.). Cicero approves of auguries and the like, as an accommodation to popular 
belief, as also of deceiving the people by allowing them only the appearance of political 
liberty, since he regards the mass of men as radically unreasonable and unfit for freedom 
(De Nat. Deor., III. 2; De Divinat., 11. 12, 33, 72; De Leg., 11. 7; 111. 12 et al.). 

Cicero is most attractive in those parts of his works, in which in an eleyated rhetorical 
style, and without touching upon subtle matters of dispute, he sets forth the truths and sen- 
timents which are universally affirmed by the moral consciousness of man. His praise of 
disinterested virtue, for example (De Fin., 11. 4; V. 22), is very successful; so, in particular, 
is the manner in which the idea of the moral community of mankind (on which idea, taken 
by Cicero from the spurious letter of Archytas, Plato founds in the Rep. his demand that 
philosophers should enter practically into the affairs of the state): non nobis solum nati 
sumus ortusque nostri partem patria vindicat, partem amici, etc. (De Off., I. 7; ef. De 
Fin., 11. 14), and the Aristotelian doctrine of man as a “ political animal” (De Fin., V. 
23) are presented. And, again, in his Tusculan Disp’s, the weakness of Cicero’s argumen- 
tation and the dullness of his dialectic, especially as compared with the Platonic dialectic 
which he makes his model, are not more marked than the rhetorical perfection of the pas- 
sages in which he discourses of the dignity of the human mind (Tusc., I. 24 seq.; ef. De 
Leg., 1. 7 seq.). So, too, his enthusiastic panegyric of philosophy (Tusc., V. 2: O vitae phi- 
losophia du! O virtutis indagatria expultrixque vitiorum, ete.; ef. De Leg., I. 22 seq.; Acad., 
I. 2; Tuse., 1. 26; II. 1 and 4; De Of-, I. 2) contains much that is felicitous in thought and 
expression (6. g., est autem unus dies bene et ex praeceptis tuis actus peccanti immortalitati ante- 
ponendus, etc.); and although it is somewhat defaced by rhetorical exaggeration, it was 
inspired by a conviction which was deeply rooted in Cicero’s mind at the time when he 
wrote the works just cited. 

Seneca (Nat. Quaest., VII. 32) says of the school of the Sextians, that after having com- 
menced its existence with great éclat, it soon disappeared. Q. Sextius (born about 70 B. 6.) 
was the founder of the school, and Sextius, his son, Sotion of Alexandria (whose instruc- 
tions Seneca enjoyed about 18-20 a. p.), Cornelius Celsus, L. Crassitius of Tarentum, and 
Papirius Fabianus, are named as his disciples. Q. Sextius and Sotion wrote in Greek. 
Sotion inspired his pupil, Seneca, with admiration for Pythagoras (Sen., Hp., 108); absti- 
nence from animal food, daily self-examination, and a leaning toward the doctrine of the 
transmigration of souls, are among the Pythagorean elements in the philosophy of the 
Sextians. Their teaching seems to have consisted principally of exhortations to moral 
excellence, to energy of soul, and to independence with reference to external things. The 
sage, says Sextius, goes through life armed by his virtues against all the contingencies of 
fortune, wary and ready for battle, like a well-ordered army when the foe is near (Sen., 
Ep., 59). Virtue and the happiness which flows from it are not ideals without reality (as 
they had come to be regarded by the later Stoics), but goods attainable by men (Sen., Zp., 
64). (The collection of aphorisms, which has come down to us in the Latin translation of 
Rufinus, is the work of a Christian, who wrote not long before a. Ὁ. 200. It is first cited 


229 PRINCIPAL DIVISIONS OF THE THIRD PERIOD. ; 


by Orig., 6. Celswm, VIIT. 30, under the title: Σέξτου γνῶμαι. A Syriac version of it exists 
and is published in the Analecta Syriaca of P. de Lagarde, Leipsic, 1858. It appears to be 
founded on a few of the authentic sayings of Q. Sextius.) 


Turrp (Prevaminety THEoxoaicaL) Prriop or GREEK 
PHILOSOPHY. 


THE NEO-PLATONISTS AND THEIR PREDECESSORS IN 
THEOSOPHICAL SPECULATION. 


§ 62. To the Third Period of Greek philosophy, or the period of 
the predominance of theosophy, belong: 1) the Jewish-Greek phi- 
losophers, 2) the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Pythagorizing Platon- 
ists, 3) the Neo-Platonists. The Jewish-Greek philosophers sought 
to blend Judaism with Hellenism. The philosophy of the Neo- 
Pythagoreans, Pythagorizing Platonists, and Neo-Platonists was 
theosophic. To this the previous development of Greek philosophy 
itself was alone sufficient to conduct them, when physical and mental 
investigation had ended in Skepticism and Eclecticism. This state 
of Greek philosophy (especially, in view of the close contact in this 
period of the West with the East) could not but induce a greater 
susceptibility to Oriental influences than had hitherto existed, and 
such influences did operate, in no insignificant measure, to determine 
the form and substance of the speculation of the period. 


On the Greek philosophers of this period, cf. the first section of E. W. M@ller’s Geschichte der Kosmo- 
logie in der griechischen Kirche bis auf Origenes, Halle, 1860 (pp. 5-111). 


The influence of the Orient was an important co-operating factor in determining the 
character of the philosophy of this period (see Ritter, History of Philosophy, IV. p. 330 
seq.); but there were also internal causes—to which Zeller rightly directs attention (Ph. d. 
Gr., 2d ed., Vol. III. b, pp. 56 seq., 368 seq.)—which produced a leaning toward ἃ mythical 
theology. ‘‘The feeling of alienation from God and the yearning after a higher revelation 
are universal characteristics of the last centuries of the ancient world; this yearning was, 
in the first place, but an expression of the consciousness of the decline of the classical 
nations and of their culture, the presentiment of the approach of a new era, and it called 
into life not only Christianity, but also, before it, pagan and Jewish Alexandrianism, and 
other related developments.” But this same feeling of exhaustion and this yearning after 
extraneous aid, accompanied, as they were, by a diminished power of original thought, led, 
in religion, to the adoption of Oriental forms of worship and Oriental dogmas, and, above 
all, in speculation, to sympathy with the Oriental tendency to conceive God as the tran- 
scendent rather than as the immanent cause ef the world, and to regard self-abnegation as 


»..... 





EE ΨΨΨΨΨΨΒΟ6Μ6ΟσΘ.0ἤΦᾳ0Φ0ΦΙΝΟΝ 





THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 293 


the essential form of morality, while, under the same influence, special emphasis was 
placed on the kindred elements in Greek, and especially in the Platonic philosophy. Neo- 
Platonism is a philosophy of syncretism. Its elements are partly Oriental (Alexandrian- 
Jewish, in particular) and partly Hellenic; its form is Hellenic. The religious philosophy 
of the Alexandrian Jews and the Gnosis of early Christianity are products of the same ele- 
ments, but under an Oriental form. Robert Zimmermann rightly remarks (Gesch. der 
Aesthetik, Vienna, 1858, p. 123), that Plato’s attempt to translate Oriental mysticism into 
scientific speculation, ends in Neo-Platonism with a re-translation of thought into images. 

The traits common to the speculations of the Jewish-Greek philosophers and the Neo- 
Pythagoreans, the later Platonists and Neo-Platonists, are aptly enumerated by Zeller 
(Philos. der Griechen, 1st ed., III. p. 566 seq., 2d ed., III. b., p. 214) as follows: ‘‘The dualistic 
opposition of the divine and the earthly; an abstract conception of God, excluding all knowl- 
edge of the divine nature; contempt for the world of the senses, on the ground of the Pla- 
tonic doctrines of matter and of the descent of the soul from a superior world into the body; 
the theory of intermediate potencies or beings, through whom God acts upon the world of 
phenomena; the requirement of an ascetic self-emancipation from the bondage of sense, and 
faith in a higher revelation to man, when in a state called Enthusiasm.” From Plato’s own 
doctrine these later forms of Greek philosophy, notwithstanding all their intended agreement 
with and actual dependence on it, are yet very essentially distinguished by the principle of 
revelation contained in them. To the Nec-Platonists the writings of Plato, the “ God- 
enlightened” (Procl., Theol. Plat. I. 1), became a kind of revealed record. The most 
obscure and abstruse of them (6. g., the Pseudo-Platonic Parmenides, with its dry schema- 
tism and its sophistical play with the conceptions of One and Being) were to many of these 
philosophers the most welcome, and were regarded by them as the most sublime docu- 
ments of Platonic theology, because they offered the freest room for the play of their 
unbridled imaginings concerning God and divine things. 

Granting that theosophical speculation, in comparison with the investigation of nature 
and man, may appear as the higher and more important work, still Neo-Platonism remains 
decidedly inferior to its precursors in the earlier Greek philosophy, since it did not solve 
its problem with the same measure of scientific perfection with which they solved theirs. 


§ 63. There is as yet no distinct evidence of a combination of 
Jewish theology with Greek philosophemes in the Septuagint, or in the 
doctrines of the Essenes. Such a combination existed, possibly, in the 
doctrine of the Zherapeutes, who held certain doctrines and usages in 
common with the Pythagoreans, and certainly in the teachings of Aris- 
tobulus (about 160 B.c.), who appealed to (spurious) Orphic poems, 
into which Jewish doctrines had been incorporated, in support of the 
assertion (in which he agrees with DPseudo-Aristeas), that the Greek 
poets and philosophers borrowed their wisdom from a very ancient 
translation of the Pentateuch. The biblical writings, says Aristo- 
bulus (who interprets them allegorically), were inspired by the Spirit 
of God. God is invisible; he sits enthroned in the heavens, and is 
not in contact with the earth, but only acts upon it by his power. 
He formed the world out of material previously existing. In de- 


9294 THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 


fending the observance of the Sabbath, Aristobulus employs a Pytha- 
gorizing numerical symbolism. The personification of the wisdom 
of God as an intermediate essence between God and the world, and 
pre-existing before the heavens and the earth, seems to have begun 
already with him. In the Book of Wisdom (of Pseudo-Solomon) 
wisdom is distinguished from the divine essence itself, as the power 
of God which works in the world. But Philo (born about 25 8. c.) 
was the first who set up a complete system of theosophy. With him 
the expounding of the books of the Old Testament is synonymous 
with the philosophy of his nation; but in his own exposition he alle- 
gorically introduces into those documents philosophical ideas, partly 
derived from the natural, internal development of Jewish notions, 
and partly appropriated from Hellenic philosophy. He teaches that 
God is incorporeal, invisible, and cognizable only through the reason ; 
that he is the most universal of beings, the being to whom alone being, 
as such, truly pertains; that he is more excellent than virtue, than 
science, or even than the good per se and the beautiful per se. He is 
one and simple, imperishable and eternal; his existence is absolute 
and separate from the world; the world is his work. God alone is 
free ; every thing finite is involved in necessity. God is not in con- 
tact with matter ; if he were he would be defiled. He who holds the 
world itself to be God the Lord has fallen into error and sacrilege. 
In his essence, God is incomprehensible; we can only know that he 
is, not what he is. All names which are intended to express the 
separate attributes of God are appropriate only in a figurative sense, 
since God is in truth unqualified and pure being. God is present 
in the world only by his operations, not by his essence. The Logos, 
a being intermediate between God and the world, dwells with God 
as his wisdom (σοφία) and as the place of the Ideas. The Logos is dif- 
fused through the world of the senses as divine reason revealing itself 
in the world. This one divine rational potency is divided into numer- 
ous subsidiary or partial potencies (δυνάμεις, λόγοιν), which are minister- 
ing spirits and instruments of the divine will, immortal souls, demons, 
or angels; they are identical with the general and specific essences, 
the ideas; but the Logos, whose parts they are, is the idea of ideas, 
the most universal of all things except God. The Logos does not exist 
from eternity, like God, and yet its genesis is not like our own and 
that of all other created beings; it is the first-begotten son of God, 
and is for us, who are imperfect, a God; the wisdom of God is its 








THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 225 


mother; it is the older and the world is the younger son of God. 
Through the agency of the Logos, God created the world and has 
revealed himself to it. The Logos is also the representative of the 
world before God, acting as its high-priest, intercessor, and Para- 
clete. The Jews are the nation to whom God revealed himself; from 
them the Greeks borrowed their wisdom. Knowledge and virtue are 
gifts of God, to be obtained only by self-abnegation on the part of 
man. <A life of contemplation is superior to one of practical, political 
occupation. The various minor sciences serve as a preparatory train- 
ing for the knowledge of God. Of the philosophical disciplines, 
logic and physics are of little worth. The highest step in phi- 
losophy is the intuition of God, to which the sage attains through 
divine illumination, when, completely renouncing himself and leaving 
behind his finite self-consciousness, he resigns himself unresistingly to 
the divine influence. 


On Judaism under the influence of Greek civilization, ef. the sections relating to this subject in Isaak 
Marcus Jost’s Gesch. des Judenthums (Vol. I., Leips. 1857, pp. 99-108; 844-861, etc.), and in the comprehen- 
sive work of H. Gritz, Geschichte der Juden (Vol. III., Leips. 1856, pp. 298-342), as also in the works of 
Ewald (see above, p. 10) and others, and H. Schultz, Die jiidische Religionsphilosophie bis zur Zerstérung 
Jerusalems (in Gelzer's Prot. Monatsbl. Vol. 24, No. 4, Oct., 1864), and Wilhel. Clemens, Die Therapeuten 
(Progr. of the Gymn. Fridericanwm), Koénigsberg, 1869. 

Of Aristobulus and Aristeas treat Gerh. Jo. Voss (De hist. Graec., Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1677, I. ch. 10, 
p. 55 seq.), Is. Voss (De LAX. Interpret., The Hague, 1661; Observ. ad Pomp. Mel., London, 1686), Fabric, 
(Bibl. Gr., IIL, p. 469), Rich. Simon ( Hist. crit. d. V. T., Paris, 1678, II. 2, p. 189; III. 23, p. 479), Humfred 
Hody (Contra historiam Aristeae de LX Δ΄. interpretibus, etc., Oxford, 1685, and De bibliorum tert. orig., 
versionibus, etc., ibid. 1705), Nic. de Nourry (Paris, 1708), Ant. van Dale (Amsterdam, 1705), Ludoy. Casp. 
Valekenaer, De Aristobulo Judaeo philosopho Peripatetico Alecandrino, ed. Jo. Luzac, Leyden, 1806; ef. 
Lobeck, Aglaophamus, I. p.447; Matter, Hssai histor. sur Cécole @ Alerandrie, Paris, 1820, vol. IL. p. 121 seq. ; 
οὗ, also, the works of Gfrorer (II. 71 seq.) and Diihne (IL. 78 seq.) cited below; Georgii, in Illgen’s Zeitschrift 
I. hist. Theol., 1859, No. 8, p. 86, and Rob. Binde, Aristobulische Studien (Gymn. Progr.), Glogau, 1869. 

On Pseudo-Phocylides (a poem of Jewish origin, devoted to moral philosophy), ef. Jak. Bernays, Ueber 
das Phokylideische Gedicht, ein Beitrag zur hellenistischen Litt., Berlin, 1856; Otto Goram, De Pseudo- 
Phocylide, in the Philol., XIV., 1859, pp. 91-112; Leopold Schmidt, in Jahn’s Jahrd., Vol. 75, 1857, p. 510 
seq. where Schmid sceks to point out separately the Hellenistic or Jewish-Alexandrian and the purely 
Jewish elements in the principal passage of the poem, and excludes all but the last-named as interpolated. 

Philo’s works have been edited by Thom. Mangey (London, 1742), A. P. Pfeiffer (Erlangen, 1785-92, 
2d ed., 1820), and C. E. Richter (Leips. 1828-30), among others; a stereotyped edition was published at 
Leipsic in 1851-53; Philo’s book on the creation of the world has been published, preceded by a careful intro- 
duction by J. G. Miller (Berlin, 1841); Philonea, ed. C. Tischendorf, Leipsic, 1868. On Philo’s doctrine, ef. 
especially, August Gfrérer, Philo und die alerandrinische Theosophie, Stuttgart, 1831 (also under the 
title: Aritische Geschichte dex Christenthwms, Vol. I.); Aug. Ferd. Dihne, Geschichtliche Darstellung 
der jiidisch-alewandrinischen Religionsphilosophie, Halle, 1884. See also Christian Ludw. Georgii, Veter 
die neuesten Gegensitze in Auffassung der Alerandrinischen Religionsphilosophie, insbesondere dex 
jid. Alexandrinismus, in Illgen’s Zeitschrift f. hist. Theol., 1839, No. 3, pp. 8-98, and No. 4, pp. 3-98. Gross- 
man has written a number of works on Philo (Leips. 1829, 1830 seq.): other writers on the same subject 
are Hl. Planck (De interpr. Phil. alleg., Gott. 180T), W. Scheffer (Quaest. Philon., Marburg, 1829, 1881), Fr. 
Creuzer (in Ullman and Umbreit’s Theol. Stud. u. Krit., Jahrgang V., Vol. I., 1832, pp. 8-43, and in Creu- 
zer’s work, Zur Gesch. der griech. τι. rom. Litt., Darmst. and Leips. 1847, pp. 407-446), F. Keferstein (Ph.’s 
Lehre von dem gottl. Mittelwesen, Leips. 1846), J. Bucher (Philonische Studien, ΤῸ. 1848), M. Wolff (Die 
Philonische Philosophie, etc., Leips. 1849; 2d ed., Gothenburg, 1858), L. Noack (Psyche, Vol. IL, No. 5, 
1859), Z. Frankel (Zur Ethik des Philo, in the Monatschr. fiir Gesch. u. Wiss, des Judenthums, July, 1867), 
and Ferd. Delaunay (Philon d’Alexandrie, Paris, 1867). 


15 


296 THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 


For us, the earliest document of Jewish-Alexandrian culture is the Septuagint. The 
oldest parts of it, among which the translation of the Pentateuch belongs, reach back into 
the earliest period of the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (who was king from 284 to 247 
Β. 6). Aristobulus says (ap. Eusebius, Praepar. Evang., XIII. 12, in a fragment of his 
dedicatory epistle to the king, who—according to Euseb., Praepar. Ev., IX. 6, with which 
Clem. Alex., Strom., I. p. 342, is to be compared—was Ptolemy Philometor), that before 
the time of Alexander, and also before the supremacy of the Persians in Egypt, the four 
last books of the Pentateuch had been already translated, Demetrius Phalereus taking the 
lead in the matter. According to a statement of Hermippus the Callimachean (Diog. L., 
V. 78), Demetrius lived at the court of Ptolemzeus Lagi only, but under Philadelphus was 
obliged to avoid the country. This account is not in contradiction with that of Aris- 
tobulus (and R. Simon, Hody, and others, are consequently at fault in arguing from the 
supposed contradiction, that the fragments of Aristobulus are spurious); we may, rather, 
conclude from the two reports that preparations were made for the translation by Demetrius 
during the life of Ptolemzeus Lagi (but probably not till the last part of his reign), and that it 
may have then been begun, but that it was principally accomplished under Philadelphus; 
Josephus (4nt., XII. 2) places the commencement of the translation in the year 285 B. Ὁ, 
Whether certain parts of the Pentateuch were really translated into Greek still earlier is 
doubtful, but they were certainly not translated at so early an epoch as that named by Aris- 
tobulus. The translation of the principal canonical writings may have been completed under 
Ptolemy Euergetes, the successor of Philadelphus, soon after his accession to the throne 
(247). Parts were added to the Hagiographa at least as late as 130 B. Cc. (according to the 
Prologue of Siracides), and without doubt also very much later. Dahne (II. pp. 1-72) pro- 
fesses to have discovered in the Septuagint numerous traces of the Jewish-Alexandrian 
philosophy, which was subsequently more fully developed by Philo; according to him, the 
authors of this translation of the Bible knew and approved the principal doctrines of this 
philosophy, contrived to suggest them by apparently insignificant deviations from the 
original text, and, foreseeing the method of allegorical interpretation, which was subse- 
quently to be adopted, endeavored by the construction of their translation to facilitate it. 
But the passages on which Dahne founds his argumentation by no means force us to this 
very doubtful hypothesis (see Zeller, Ph. d. Gr., 1st ed., III., pp. 569-573, 2d ed., III. b., p. 
215 seq.); we find only that, as a rule, the notion of the sensible manifestation of God is 
suppressed, anthropopathic ideas, such as the idea of God’s repenting, are toned down in 
their expression, the distance between God, in his essence, and the world, is increased, and 
the ideas of mediating links between the two (in the form of divine potencies, angels, the 
divine δόξα, the Messias as a heavenly mediator) appear more fully developed than in the 
original text. In these peculiarities germs of the later religious philosophy may undoubt- 
edly be seen, but not as yet this philosophy itself. It is scarcely necessary, either, to see 
in them a union of Greek philosophemes with Jewish ideas. 

Such a union is first discoverable with certainty in the fragments of Aristobulus, the 
Alexandrian, who (according to Clem. Al. and Eusebius) was usually styled a Peripatetic. 
The passages in Eusebius, cited above, establish beyond a doubt that he lived under Ptole- 
mzus Philometor (181-145 B. c.), notwithstanding several evidently erroneous authorities, 
which place him under Ptol. Philadelphus. He wrote a commentary on the Pentateuch, and 
dedicated it to Ptolemy (Philometor). Fragments of the same and of the dedicatory epistle 
are preserved in Clem. Alex., Strom., I. (12 and) 25; (V. 20:) VI. 37, and in Euseb., Praepar. 
Ev., VII. 13 and 14; VIII. 6 and 10; IX. 6,and XITI.12. In the fragments furnished us by 
Eusebius, Aristobulus cites a number of passages purporting to have been taken from the 
poems of Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod, and Linus, but which were evidently brought into the 








“5. 


THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 297 


form in which they are cited by some Jew, and perhaps by Aristobulus himself. (Yet ef. 
Jost, Gesch. des Judenthums, 1., p. 369 seq., who disputes the latter supposition.) The 
most extensive and important fragment is one which purports to be taken from the ἱερὸς 
λόγος of Orpheus (Eus., Praep. Hv., XIII. 12); the same fragment, in another form, has been 
preserved by Justin Martyr, De Monarchia (p. 37, Paris edition, 1742), so that it is still pos 
sible to point out precisely the changes made in it by some Jew. The main doctrines of 
the poem are thus recapitulated by Aristobulus: All created things exist and are upheld 
by divine power, and God is over all things (διακρατεῖσθαι θείᾳ δυνάμει τὰ πάντα καὶ γενητὰ 
ὑπάρχειν καὶ ἐπὶ πάντων εἶναι τὸν θεόν). But in the God who accomplishes and rules over 
all things (κόσμοιο τυπωτήῆς... αὐτοῦ δ᾽ ὕπο πάντα τελεῖται, ἐν δ᾽ αὐτοῖς αὐτὸς περινίσσεται), 
Aristobulus recognizes not, with the Grecian poets and philosophers (especially the Stoics), 
the Deity himself, but only the Divine potency (δύναμις), by whom the world is governed; 
God himself is an extra~-mundane being; he is enthroned in the heavens, and the earth is 
under his feet; he is invisible, not only to the senses, but to the eye of the human soul— 
the νοῦς alone perceives him (οὐδέ tic αὐτὸν εἰσοράᾳ ψυχῶν θνητῶν, νῷ δ᾽ εἰσοράαται). In 
these theological and psychological propositions it is possible to discover a reversion to the 
Aristotelian doctrine and a modification of the Stoic, and, in so far, a justification of the 
denomination Peripatetic as applied to Aristobulus; but they bear, at least to an equal 
extent, the impress of the religious faith of the Jewish nation. In interpreting the seven 
days’ work of creation, Aristobulus interprets, metaphorically, the light, which was created 
on the first day, as symbolizing the wisdom by which all things are illumined, which some 
of the (Peripatetic) philosophers had compared to a torch; but, he adds, one of his own 
nation (Solomon, Prov. viii. 22 seq.?) had testified of it more distinctly and finely, that it 
existed before the heavens and the earth. Aristobulus then endeavors to show how the 
whole order of the world rests on the number seven: δ᾽ ἑβδομάδων δὲ καὶ πᾶς ὁ κόσμος 
κυκλεῖται (Aristob., ap. Euseb., Pr. Ev., XIII. 12). 

Aristeas is the nominal author of a letter to Philocrates, in which are narrated the 
circumstances attending the translation of the sacred writings of the Hebrews by the 
seventy (or seventy-two) interpreters (ed. Sim. Schard, Basel, 1561; ed. Bernard, Ox- 
ford, 1692, and in the editions of Josephus; also in Hody, De Bibl. Text. Orig., Oxford, 
1705, pp. i—xxxvi.). The letter states that Aristeas had been sent by the king of Egypt 
to Eleazar, the high-priest, at Jerusalem, to ask for a copy of the law and for men who 
would translate it. The letter is spurious, and the narrative full of fables. It was probably 
written in the time of the Asmoneans. In this letter, a distinction is made between the 
power (δύναμις) or government (δυναστεία) of God, which is in all places (διὰ πάντων ἐστίν, 
πάντα τόπον πληροῖ), and God himself, the greatest of beings (μέγεστος), the lord over all 
things (ὁ κυρεεύων ἁπάντων θεός), who stands in need of nothing (ἀπροσδεής), and is enthroned 
in the heavens. ΑἹ] virtue is said to descend from God. God is truly honored, not by gifts 
and offerings, but by purity of soul (ψυχῆς xaBapiéry71).—The allegorical form of interpreta- 
tion appears already brought to a considerable degree of perfection in Pseudo-Aristeas. 

In the Second Book of the Maccabees (ii. 39)—which is an extract from the history of the 
Syrian wars, written by Jason of Cyrene—the distinction made between God himself, who 
dwells in the heavens, and the divine power, ruling in the temple at Jerusalem, recalls 
the similar Alexandrian dogma. Non-Alexandrian, on the contrary, are the belief in the 
resurrection, by divine favor, of the bodies of the just (vii. 9-14; xiv. 46), and in creation 
out of nothing (vii. 28), if, indeed, the latter doctrine is to be understood here in its strict 
dogmatic sense. Some have attempted, further, to point out analogies with Alexandrian 
doctrines in the third and fourth Books of Maccabees, in the third Book of Ezra, in the 
Jewish portions of the Stoyllines, and in the Wisdom of Siracides. The Pseudo-Solomonie 


228 THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 


Book of Wisdom, which appears to have been composed before the time of Philo, describea 
wisdom as the reflected splendor of the divine light, as a mirror of the divine efficiency, an 
efflux of the divine glory, and as a spirit diffused through the whole world, fashioning ai. 
things with art and uniting itself to those souls who are pleasing to God. The pre- 
existence of individual souls is taught (i. 20, in the words: ἀγαθὺς ὧν ἦλθον εἰς σῶμα 
ἀμίαντον); the resurrection of all men, of the good to blessedness and of the bad to judg- 
ment, is taught, and men are referred for happiness to the future life. God created the 
world from a pre-existing matter (xi. 18). 

At what time the society of Hssenes arose in Palestine and of Therapeutes in Egypt, is 
uncertain. Josephus first mentions the HKssenes in his account of the times of Jonathan 
the Maccabean (about 160 B. c.); there existed, he says, at that time, three sects (αἱρέσεις) 
among the Jews, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes (ἀπέ, XIII. 5). It seems 
necessary to regard the name of the Essenes as derived from chaschah, to be silent, mys. 
terious (conservers of secret doctrines, mystics). They sought to attain to the highest de- 
gree of holiness by the most rigid abstemiousness (after the example of the Nazarites), 
and transmitted to their successors a secret doctrine respecting angels and the creation 
(from which, as it appears, the Cabbala subsequently arose; ef. below, § 97). The Thera- 
peutes (who were more given to mere contemplation in monastic retirement) sprung froma 
the Essenes (rather than the latter from the former). The doctrine of the Therapeutes was 
related to the Pythagorean, and more especially to the Neo-Pythagorean doctrine. That 
the body is a prison for the (pre-existent and post-existent) soul—also the doctrine of con. 
traries which are everywhere present in the world, are tenets belonging to ancient Pytha. 
goreanism; not so the Therapeutic inhibition of the oath, of bloody offerings, and of the use 
of meat and wine (at least, according to the testimony of Aristoxenus the Aristotelian, not 
the earliest Pythagoreans, but only the Orphists and a part of the Pythagoreans of the fifth 
and fourth centuries B. C., abstained from the use of meat), and the recommendation of 
celibacy, the doctrine of angels (demons), magic, and prophecy—traits which reappear in 
Neo-Pythagoreanism, and are unmistakably of Oriental origin. It is conceivable that (as 
Zeller assumes) these doctrines and customs were derived from the East by the Orphists 
and Pythagoreans, that before the time of the Maccabees they passed from the latter to 
the Jews in Palestine (the Essenes), and that the latter again delivered them to the Jews 
in Egypt (the Therapeutes). Still, itis improbable that Pythagoreanism, at a time when it 
had become nearly or quite extinguished (cf. Zeller, I., 2d edition, p. 215, 3d edition, p. 
251), could have exerted so powerful influence on a portion of the Jewish nation, and it is 
more natural to suppose (with Hilgenfeld) that the Therapeutic doctrine of abstinence was 
transmitted without Grecian intervention from the Parsees—after they, for their part, had 
submitted in their doctrine to a Buddhistic influence—to the Jews of Palestine and from 
the latter to the Egyptian Jews. The existence of the Therapeutic sect may, however, on 
its part, have been among the causes which induced the rise of Neo-Pythagoreanism at 
Alexandria. 

Philo the Jew lived at Alexandria, which he calls ‘our Alexandria” (ἡμετέρα ᾿Αλεξαν- 
dpeia) in his work De Legatione ad Cajum (ed. Mangey, vol. II. 567). According to Josephus 
(Ant. XVIII. 8; XX. 5), he was descended from one of the most illustrious families of the 
country; Husebius (Hist. Eccl., ΤΙ. 4) and Hieronymus (Catal. Scriptorum Eccles.) report that 
he belonged to a sacerdotal family. His brother held the office of Alabarches (superinten- 
dent of the Jews at Alexandria). In the first half of the year 40 Philo was at Rome as an 
ambassador from the Alexandrian Jews to the Emperor Caius; he was then already ad- 
vanced in years (De Legat. ad Cajum, ed. Mang., II. 592), and at the period when he wrote 
his account of this embassy—probably soon after the death of Caius (4. Ὁ. 41) and during the 


THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 299 


reign of Claudius—he classed himself among the old men (γέροντες). His birth falls. com 
sequently, in the third decade before Christ. 

The allegorical method of interpreting the sacred Scriptures, which had long prevailed 
among the more cultivated of the Alexandrian Jews, was adopted by Philo without restric- 
tion. His principle, that the prophets were only involuntary instruments of the spirit 
which spoke through them, was favorable to the freest use of this mode of exegesis. 
Philo criticises the attitude of those who merely bold fast to the literal sense of Scriptures 
as low, unworthy, and superstitious ; he denies, in opposition, obviously, to a claim of the 
orthodox, that this is “‘unvarnished piety without ostentation” (ἀκαλλώπιστον εὐσέβειαν 
μετὰ ἀτυφίας), affirming this honorable description as applicable, rather, to his mystical 
method of interpretation, and describing his opponents as being affected with the incurable 
disease of word-picking, and blinded by the deceptive influence of custom (De Cherubim, 
ed. Mang., I. 146). God can certainly not be said properly to go to and fro, or to have feet 
with which to walk forwards, he, the uncreated author of all things, who fills all, etc.; the 
anthropomorphitic representations of Scripture are only permitted as an accommodation to 
the wants of the sensuous man, while for the discerning and spiritual it declares that God is 
not like a map, nor like the heavens, nor like the world ( Quod Deus sit immutabilis, ed. Mang., 
I. 280 seq.). Philo does not reject the literal sense in every case; he often, especially in 
the case of historical statements, assumes both this and the higher or allegorical sense as 
equally true; but the latter, in his view, is never absent. Yet, with the same positiveness 
with which Philo combats the literalists, does he also oppose those Symbolists, who ad- 
vanced to a consequence which threatened to overthrow the positive content of Judaism, 
by ascribing not only to the doctrines, but also to the commands, of the ceremonial law, a 
merely figurative character, and by teaching that the literal observance of the latter was 
superfluous, and that it was only necessary to observe the moral precepts, which alone they 
were intended to inculcate. Philo recognizes, it is true, that even in the commands of 
Scripture the literal sense is always accompanied by another, more profound and higher; 
but, he says, they are to be observed according to the former as well as the latter sense, 
since both belong together, like soul and body. ‘ Although circumcision properly sym- 
bolizes the removal of all passion and sensuality and impious thoughts, yet we may not 
therefore set aside the practice enjoined; for in that case we should be obliged to give up 
the public worship of God in the temple, and a thousand other necessary solemnities ” (De 
Migratione Abrahami, ed. Mang., 1. 450). Yet the inference rejected by Philo appeared 
later in the doctrine, that (Christian) faith, even without the works of the law, was suffi- 
cient to salvation. That the idea of God, which was alone worthy of Him, would one 
day create for itself another and more adequate ‘“‘body” than that of the Mosaic cere- 
monial law, was a conviction to which Philo was unable to attain. 

The theology of Philo is a blending of Platonism and Judaism. While Philo contends 
that God is to be worshipped as a personal being, he yet conceives Him at the same 
time as the most general of existences: τὸ γενικώτατόν ἐστιν ὁ θεός (Legis Alleg., II.). God 
is the only truly existent being, τὸ ὄν (De Soman., I. 655, Mang.). But Philo, similarly to 
the Neo-Platonists of a later epoch, advances upon the Platonic doctrine by representing 
God as exalted not only above all human knowledge and virtue—as Plato had done—but 
also above the idea of the Good—(kpeirtwv te ἢ ἀρετὴ καὶ κρείττων ἢ ἐπιστήμη, καὶ κρείττων ἢ 
αὐτὸ τἀγαθὸν καὶ αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, De Mundi Opijicio, I. 2, ed. Mang.)—with which Plato identifies 
Him—and by teaching that we do not arrive at the Absolute by scientific demonstration 
(λόγων ἀποδείξει), but by an immediate subjective certainty (évapyeia, De post. Caini, 48, p. 
258 Mang.). Still, a certain kind of knowledge of God, which, however, is only second in 
rank, results from the aesthetic and teleological view of the world, as founded on the Socratie 


230 THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 


principle that ‘‘no work of skill makes itself” (οὐδὲν τῶν τεχνικῶν ἔργων amavrouariveras, 
God is one and simple: ὁ θεὸς μόνος ἐστὶ καὶ ἕν, ov σύγκριμα, φύσις ἁπλῆ... τέτακται οὖν 
ὁ θεὸς κατὰ τὸ ἕν καὶ τὴν μονάδα, μᾶλλον δὲ καὶ ἡ μονὰς κατὰ τὸν ἕνα θεόν (Legis Alleg., 
II.; ed. Mang., I. 66 seq.). God is the only free nature (ἡ μόνη ἐλευθέρα φύσις, De Somn., 
IL.), full of himself and sufficient to himself (αὐτὸ ἑαυτοῦ πλῆρες καὶ ἑαυτῷ ἱκανόν, De Nom. 
Mutat., 1. 582). Notwithstanding the pantheistically-sounding neuters which Philo applies 
to God, he ascribes to him the purest blessedness: ‘‘He is without grief or fear, not 
subject to evils, unyielding, painless, never wearied, filled with unmixed happiness” (De 
Cherubim, I. 154). God is everywhere by his power (τὰς δυνάμεις αὑτοῦ διὰ γῆς καὶ ὕδατος͵ 
ἀέρος Te καὶ οὐρανοῦ τείνας), but in no place with his essence, since space and place 
were first given to the material world by him (De Linguarum Conf., I. 425). Speaking 
figuratively, Philo describes God as enthroned on the outermost border of the heavens 
in an extra-mundane place (τόπος μετακόσμιος), as in a sacred citadel (Genes., 28,15; De Vit. 
Mos., 11. 164, ete.). God is the place of the world, for it is He that contains and encom- 
passes all things (De Sommnits, 1.). 

In creating the world, God employed as instruments incorporeal potencies or ideas, 
since he could not come in contact with polluting matter (ἐξ ἐκείνης (τῆς οὐσίας) πάντ' 
ἐγέννησεν ὁ θεός, οὐκ ἐφαπτόμενος αὐτός - ov yap ἦν θέμις ἀπείρου καὶ πεφυρμένης ὕλης 
ψαύειν τὸν iduova καὶ μακάριον: ἀλλὰ ταῖς ἀσωμάτοις δυνάμεσιν, ὧν ἔτυμον ὄνομα αἱ ἱδέαι, 
κατεχρήσατο πρὸς τὸ γένος ἕκαστον τὴν ἁρμόττουσαν λαβεῖν μορφήν, De Sacrificantibus, 11. 
261). These potencies surround God as ministering spirits, just as a monarch is sur- 
rounded by the members of his court. The highest of the divine potencies, the creative 
(ποιητική), bears also, according to Philo, in Scripture the name of God (θεός) ; the second 
or ruling (βασιλική) potency, is called Lord (κύριος, De Vita Mosis, 11., 150 et al.). These 
are followed by the foreseeing potency, the law-giving, and many others. They are all 
conceived by Philo, not only as of the nature of divine qualities, but also as relatively 
independent, personal beings, who can appear to men and who have favored some of them 
(6. g., Abraham) with their more intimate intercourse (De Vita Abrah., II. 17 seq.). 

The highest of all the divine forces is the Logos (Word). The world of ideas (ὁ ἐκ τῶν 
ἰδεῶν κόσμος) has its place (τόπος) in the divine Logos, just as the plan of a city is in the 
soul of the master-builder (De Mundi Opificto, 1. 4). Philo also uses sometimes the name 
Sophia (Wisdom), which with Aristobulus and other earlier speculators was the name for 
the highest of the potencies intermediate between God and the world (e.g., Legis Alleg., I. : 
ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ σοφία, ἣν ἄκραν Kai πρωτίστην ἔτεμεν ἀπὸ τῶν ἑαυτοῦ δυνάμεων), but Logos is the 
term more commonly employed by him. Sometimes he seems to conceive Sophia as the 
highest of the potencies into which the Logos is divided, and as the source of all the rest. 
For the Logos is two-fold in its nature, and that, too, in man as well as in the All. In man 
there is ἃ 2όγος ἐνδιάθετος and a λόγος mpodoptKdc; the former is the reason which dwells in 
man, the latter is the spoken word; the former is, as it were, the source, the latter the out- 
flowing stream. (Cf. Plat.? Soph., 2608. 6: διάνοια is the interior discourse of the mind, 
and Arist.: ὁ ἔσω λόγος, see above, p. 143.) But of the Logoi which belong to the All, 
the one which corresponds with the ἐνδιάθετος in man, dwells in the incorporeal and 
archetypal ideas of which the intelligible world consists; the other, corresponding with 
the προφορικός in man, is diffused in the form of germs (the λόγος σπερματικός) in the things 
which are seen, and which are imitations and copies of the ideas, and constitute the 
world of sensuous perception (De Vita Mosis, III., ed. Mang., II. 154). In other words: 
in God dwells reason, thought (ἔννοια as ἐναποκειμένη νόησις), and its expression (διανόησις 
as νοήσεως διέξοδος or ῥῆμα θεοῦ, Quod Deus. sit immut., J. 218, ed. Mang., in commenting 
on Genesis, vi. 6). This reason is God’s wisdom (Sophia). Yet, in other passages, Philo 


iz 


THE JEWISH-ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. 931 


calls Sophia the mother of the Logos (De Profugis, 562, Mang.). He sees the symbol of 
the two-fold Logos in the double breast-plate (διπλοῦν λογεῖον) of the high-priest. Ordi- 
narily, however, he speaks only of the divine Logos without qualification or distinction, 
styling him Son and Paraclete, the Mediator between God and man, etc. (De Vita Mosis, 
11. 155, ed. Mang.; Quis Rerum Divin. Haeres sit, I. 501 seq., et pass.). 

The creation of the world was due to God’s attribute of love. He created it, through 
the instrumentality of the Logos, out of unqualified matter, which is therefore of the 
nature of the unreal (ὁ θεὸς αἴτιον, οὐκ ὄργανον, τὸ δὲ γιγνόμενον δι’ ὀργάνου μὲν͵, ὑπὸ δὲ 
τοῦ αἰτίου πάντως γίγνεται" εὑρήσεις αἴτιον τοῦ κόσμου τὸν θεόν, ὄργανον δὲ λόγον θεοῦ, 
ὕλην δὲ τὰ τέτταρα στοιχεῖα). 

The business of man is to follow and imitate God (De Caritate, II. 404, et pass.). The 
soul must strive to become the dwelling-place of God, his holy temple, and so to become 
strong, whereas it was before weak, and wise, whereas before it was foolish (De Somn., 
I. 23). The highest blessedness is to abide in God (πέρας εὐδαιμονίας τὸ ἀκλινῶς καὶ 
ἀῤῥεπῶς ἐν μόνῳ θεῷ στῆναι). 

Philo traces the doctrine of ideas back to Moses: Μωῦσέως ἐστὶ τὸ δόγμα τοῦτο, οὐκ ἐμόν; 
for, he says, Moses teaches (Gen., i. 27) that God created man in the image of God, and 
if this is true of man, it must certainly be true also of the entire sensible cosmos (De 
Mundi Opificto, Mang., I. 4). Obvious as are the signs of Platonic influences in Philo’s 
doctrine of ideas (Philo himself names Plato, and testifies his esteem for him), and of Stoic 
influence in his Logos-doctrine, yet in fact the transformation of the ideas mto divine 
thoughts, having their seat in the Logos of God, is an outcome of Philo’s religious concep- 
tions, and the doctrine, thus transformed, may therefore be said to come from ‘ Moses.” 
(This transformation of the Platonic theory of ideas not only exercised a controlling influ- 
ence on the philosophy of later thinkers, but it has also interfered with the correct his- 
torical comprehension of Platonism even down to our own times.) 

As in what he says of the ideas and forces generally, so also in his utterances respect- 
ing the Logos, Philo wavers between the attributive and substantive conception of it; the 
latter, according to which the Logos is hypostatized to a person, is already developed in 
his doctrine to too firm a consistency for us to suppose that the personification was for 
Philo’s own consciousness a mere poetic fiction (all the more, since in Plato the ideas are 
not mere attributes, but possess an independent and almost a personal existence), and yet 
not to a consistency of so absolute a character that Philo could be interpreted as teaching, 
as a positive doctrine, the existence beside God of a second person, in no way reducible 
to a mere attribute or function of the first person. Yet so far as Philo personifies, 


whether it be poetically or doctrinally, he owns to acertain subordinationism. The Logosis . 


for him, as it were, a chariot-driver, whom the other divine forces (δυνάμεις) must obey ; 
but God, as the master of the chariot, prescribes to the Logos the course which is to be 
maintained. Philo vaciilates consequently between the two conceptions, the analoga of 
which reappear later in the Christian church in Monarchianism and Arianism; but a doc- 
trine analogous to Athanasianism is entirely foreign to him, and would contradict his 
religious as well as his philosophical consciousness. It was impossible that he should 
conceive of the Logos as incarnated, on account of the impurity of matter in his view—a 
consideration revived at a later epoch by the Docetans—and for this reason, if for no 
other, it was impossible for Philo to go farther and identify the Logos with the expected 
Messias, to which course, nevertheless, he was powerfully moved by the practical and 
spiritual interest connected with redemption through the Messias. The incarnation of 
the Logos in Christ forms the fundamental speculative, as the invalidity of the positive 
Mosaic law and the new commandment of love form the fundamental practical, doctrine by 


282 THE NEO-PYTHAGOREANS. 


which Christianity separated from Alexandrian theosophy. The representatives of this 
theosophy being, for the most part. men of more theoretical culture than force of will, could 
not accept the doctrine of the incarnation without a sense of their infidelity to their prin- 
ciples, and did not possess the martyr’s courage—which is rarely developed in the lap of 
material and intellectual wealth—necessary for the practical renunciation of the ceremonial 
law, although this course was demanded as a logical consequence of their own views. 


§ 64. Cicero names as the first renewer of Pythagoreanism, P. 
Nigidius Figulus, who appears to have lived in the first half of the 
last century before Christ, at A’exandria. In the time of Augustus 
there originated several works falsely attributed to the earlier Pytha- 
goreans, but containing Neo-Pythagorean ideas. About the same 
time Sotion, the disciple of Sextius, the Pythagorizing Eclectic, lived 
at Alexandria. The chief representatives of Neo-Pythagoreanism 
are Apollonius of Tyana, in the time of Nero, Moderatus of Gades, 
also in the time of Nero, and Nicomachus of Gerasa, in the time of 
the Antonines. Also, Secundus of Athens (under Hadrian) appears 
to be by his own doctrine not far removed from this group of philoso- 


phers. 


To Neo-Pythagoreanism relates in fact the greater part of the literature cited above, ad § 16, pp. 48 and 
44. Cf. also Hieron. Schellberger, Die goldenen Spriiche des Pyth. in’s Devtsche tibertragen mit Εἴη. 
uw. Anm. (G.-Pr.), Minnerstadt, 1862, and, respecting the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, in general, 
Vermehren, Die pyth. Zahlen, Gistrow, 1863. Zeller, in Ph. ἃ. Gr., III., 2d edition, p. 85 seq., gives a 
summary of the pseudonymous literature (after Beckmann, Mullach, and Orelli). 

On the subject of the general revolution of philosophy among the Greeks in this period from Skep- 
ticism to Mysticism, ef. Heinr. W.J.Thiersch, Politik und Philosophie in threm Verhiliniss zur Religion 
wnter Trajanus, Hadrianus und den beiden Antoninen. Marburg, 1853, and Zeller, as cited above, ad ὃ 62. 

Lutterbeck (Die neutest. Lehrbegriffe, Vol. I., 1852, p. 810 seq.) treats of Nigidius Figuius and the Neo- 
Pythagorean school. Cf. also Biicheler, in the RA. Mus., new series, XIII, p. 177 seq., and Klein, Diss., 
Bonn, 1861. 

Philostratorum quae supersunt omnia: vita Apollonii Tyanensis, ete. Accedunt Apolloniit Tyan. 
epistolae, Eusebti liber adv. Hieroclem, ete., ed. Godofr. Olearius, Leipsic, 1709; ed. C. L. Kayser, Zarich 
(1844, 1846), 1853: ed. Ant. Westermann, Paris, 1848. Iwan Miilier, Comm., qua de Philostr. in componenda 
memoria Apollonii T. fide quaeritur, Zweibriicken, 1858-60. Of Apollonius treat: J. C. Herzog (Leips. 
1719), 5. G. Klose (Viteb. 1723-24), J. L. Mosheim (in his Comment., Hamb. 1751, p. 347 seq.), J. B. Liider- 
wald (Halle, 1793), Ferd. Chr. Baur (Apollonius und Christus, Tiibinger Zeitschrift fiir Theol., 1832), A. 
Wellaur (in Jahn’s Archiv, Vol. X., 1844, pp. 418-467); Neander (Gesch. der Christl. Religion, Theil I., 
p. 172), L. Noack (in his Psyche, Vol. 1, No. 2, Giessen, 1858), P. M. Mervoyer (Ztude sur A. de T., Paris, 
1862), A. Chassang (Le merveilleur dans Tantiquité, A. de T., sa vie, ses voyages, ses prodiges, par Phi- 
lostrate, et ses lettres, owwrages traduits du grec, avec introduction, notes et éclaircissemenis, Paris, 1862, 
2d ed. 1864); ef. Iwan Miller (Zur Apollonius-Litteratur, in the Zeitschr. fiir luth. Theoi. u. Kirhe, ed. by 
Delitzsch and Guericke, Vol. 24, 1865, pp. 412-423 and p. 592). 

Nicomachi Geraseni arithineticae, libr. 11., ed. Frid. Ast, in his edition of Jamblichi Chalcidensis 
theologumena arithmeticae, Leips. 1817. (An earlier edition of this work, Νικομάχου Tepacnvod ἀριθμη- 
τικῆς βιβλία δυο, was published at Paris in 1538.) Νικομάχου Τερασηνοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ ἀριθμητική εἰσαγωγὴ, 
Nicomachi Geraseni Pythagorei introductionis arithmeticae libr. II. rec. Ricardus Hoche, aecedunt 
codicis Cizensis problemata arithm., Leips. 1866. ᾿Ιωάννον γραμματικοῦ ᾿Αλεξανδρέως (τοῦ Φιλοπόνου) 
εἰς TO πρῶτον τῆς Νικομάχου ἀριθμητικῆς εἰσαγωγῆς. Primwm ed. Rich. Hoche, Leipsie, 1864; in libs. JT. 
Nic. introd. arith. ed. idem (G.-Pr.), Wesel, 1867. The ᾿Εγχειρίδιον ἁρμονικῆς of Nicomachus has been 
edited by Meibom in his Musici Graeci. In the Bibi. of Photius (cod. 187) there is an extract from a work 
purporting to have been written by him, and entitled “ Theologumena Arith.” 





THE NEO-PYTHAGOREANS. 933 


Secundi (Atheniensis Sophistae) Sententiae, ed. Lucas Holstenius, together with the Sentences of 
Demophilus and Democrates, Leyden, 1689, p. 810 seq.; ed. J. A. Schier (together with the Bios Sex. φιλο- 
σόφου). in Demophili, Democr. et Sec. Sent., Leips., 1154, p. ΤΙ seq.; Gr. et. Lat., ed. J. C. Orelli, in Opus- 
cula Graecorum vet. sententiosa et moralia, Leips. 1819-21, Vol. L., p. 208 seq. Tischendorf has recognized 
a part of the Bios Σεκούνδου φιλοσόφου on a sheet of papyrus discovered in Egypt, and belonging, as T. sup- 
poses, to the second, or, at the latest, to the third century of the present era; ef. Hermann Sauppe, in the 
Philol., XV11., 1861, pp. 149-154; Rud. Reicke has published an old Latin translation of this Life, from 3 
Codex in the Kénigsberg Library, in the Philologus, Vol. XVIIL, 1362, pp. 528-534. 


The return to older systems was, at Alexandria, a result in part of the learned investiga- 
tions carried on in connection with the Library, and in this respect Neo-Pythagoreanism 
stands side by side with the renewal at Alexandria of the Homeric form of poetry. A 
consideration of more essential significance is, that a philosophy which conceived the 
divine under the form of the transcendent (or which at least admitted this conception side 
by side with the conception previously prevalent and gave to the former a constantly 
increasing weight) corresponded far better with the autocratic form of government and 
the Oriental conception of life than did the systems of the period next preceding, systems 
which presuppose a certain freedom in social and political life, and which at the time now 
under consideration had already been shaken to the foundation, even in their merely 
theoretical bearings, by the spirit of doubt. The satisfaction which was not found either 
in nature or in the individual subject, was now sought in an absolute object, represented as 
beyond the spheres of both. But for the purposes of this search, Pythagoreanism and 
also Platonism offered the appropriate points of support. Added to this, finally, was the 
influence of Oriental religious ideas, Egyptian, Chaldaic, and Jewish (the influence of the 
latter being the most important) arising through the meeting of various nationalities at 
the same place and in the same political union. 

Of P. Nigidius Figulus, who was also a grammarian (Gell, WN. A., XIX. 4), Cicero 
tells us (TJim., 1) that he renewed the Pythagorean philosophy; but he cannot have 
exerted a very considerable influence, since Seneca (Quaest. Nat. VII. 32) knew nothing 
of the existence of a Neo-Pythagorean School. The school of the Sextians has been 
already mentioned (§ 61). That the predilection of the Libyan king Iobates (probably 
Juba II. of the time of Augustus) for Pythagorean writings gave occasion to forgeries, is 
reported by David the Armenian (Schol. in Arist., p. 28 ἃ, 13). Philo cites, already, the 
work attributed to Ocellus Lucanus. The work entitled πρὸς τοὺς ἀπεχομένους τῶν σαρκῶν 
mentioned by Porphyry and written by Sextius Clodius, the teacher of Marcus Antonius 
the Triumvir, seems to have been directed against those Neo-Pythagoreans who abstained 
from the use of meat (see Jac. Bernays, Theophr. Schrift tiber Frommigkeit, Berlin, 1866, 
p- 12). 

A fragment from the work of Apollonius of Tyana on Sacrifices is preserved in Euse- 
bius (Praep. Hv.,1V.13). In it Apollonius distinguishes between the one God, who exists 
separate from all things, and the other gods; to the former no offerings whatever should 
be brought, nay, more, he is not even to be named with words, but only to be apprehended 
by the reason. All earthly things are, on account of their material constitution, impure, 
and unworthy to come in contact with the supreme God. To the inferior gods Apollonius 
seems to have required the bringing of bloodless offerings. The work on Apollonius 
of Tyana, written by Flavius Philostratus (at the instance of the Empress Julia Domna, 
the wife of Septimius Severus), is a philosophico-religions romance, in which the Neo- 
Pythagorean ideal is portrayed in the person of Apollonius, and is claimed to be superior 
to that of other schools and sects (referring especially to Stoicism, and, as it would appear, 
to Christianity). 

Moderatus of Gades, who was nearly contemporaneous with Apollonius, sought to 


234 THE ECLECTIC PLATONISTS, 


justify the incorporation into Pythagoreanism of Platonic and neo-theological doctrines, 
through the hypothesis that the ancient Pythagoreans themselves intentionally expressed 
the highest truths in signs, and for that purpose made use of numbers. The number one 
was the symbol of unity and equality, and of the cause of the harmony and duration of all 
things, while two was the symbol of difference and inequality, of division and change, etc. 
(Moderatus, ap. Porphyr. Vit. Pythag., 48 seq.). 

Nicomachus of Gerasa, in Arabia, who seems to have lived about 140 or 150 A. Ὁ. 
teaches (in Arithm. Introduct., I. 6) the pre-existence of numbers before the formation of the 
world, in the mind of the Creator, where they constituted an archetype, in conformity with 
which He ordered all things. Nicomachus thus reduces the Pythagorean numbers, as 
Philo reduces the Ideas, to thoughts of God. Nicomachus defines number as definite 
quantity (πλῆθος ὡρισμένον, 1.7). In the Θέἐολογούμενα ἀριθμητικά, Nicomachus, accord- 
ing to Photius, Cod., 187, expounded the mystical signification of the first ten numbers, 
according to which the number one was God, reason, the principle of form and goodness, 
and two, the principle of inequality and change, of matter and evil, etc. The ethical 
problem for man, he teaches, is solved by retirement from the contact of impurity and 
reunion with God. 

To Secundus of Athens, the silent philosopher, who lived under Hadrian, are ascribed 
(in the Vita Secundi, a work of the second century after Christ, much read in the Middle 
Ages) certain answers (which he is reported to have made in writing) to philosophical 
questions raised by the Emperor, answers conceived in an ascetic and fantastic spirit, 
which is akin to the spirit of Neo-Pythagoreanism. 


§ 65. Among the Pythagorizing and Eclectic Platonists, who, 
through their renewal and further development of the Platonic prin- 
ciple of transcendence, in especial opposition to Stoic Pantheism 
and Epicurean Naturalism, became the precursors of Neo-Platonism, 
the best-known are Eudorus and Arius Didymus (in the time of Au- 
gustus), Dercyllides and Thrasyllus (in the time of Tiberius), Theon 
of Smyrna and Plutarch of Chaeronea (in Trajan’s time), Maximus 
of Tyre (under the Antonines), Apuleius of Madaura (in Numidia), 
Alcinous, Albinus, and Severus (of nearly the same epoch), Calvisius 
Taurus and Atticus, Galenus, the physician (131-200 a. p.), Celsus, 
the opponent of Christianity (about 200 a. p.), and Numenius of Apa- 
mea (toward the end of the second century of the present era). 

On Endorus, ef. Roper, in the Philologus, VII., 1852, p. 584 seq.; on Arius Didymus, Meineke, in Mit- 
zell’s Zeitschr. fiir das Gymn.- W., Berlin, 1859, p. 563 seq.; on Thrasyllus, Sévin (J/ém. de Vacad. des 
inscript., tom. X.), K. F. Hermann (Ind. Schol., Gott. 1852), and Miiller (Fragm. hist. G@r., 111. 501); on 
Plutarch, among others, K. Eichhoff (@ymn.-Progr., Elberfeld, 1833), Theod. Hilmar Schreiter (Doctr. Plu- 
tarchi et theologica et moralis, in Ilgen’s Zeitschr. fiir hist. Theol., Vol. V1., Leips. 1836, pp. 1-162), Ed. 
Miller (in his Gesch. der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten, Vol. 11., Berlin, 1837, pp. 207-224), 6. W. Nitzsch 
(nd. Lect., Kiel, 1849), Pohl (Die Diimonologie des Plutarch, G.-Pr., Breslau, 1861), Bazin (De Plutarcho 
Stoicorum Adversario, Thesis Parisiensis, Nice, 1866), O. Gréard (Dela Morale de Plutarque, Paris, 
1867). Rich. Volkmann (Leben, Schriften und Philos. des Plutarch, 2 parts, Berlin, 1869); on Apuleius, 
Prantl (Gesch. der Logik, I., pp. 578-591). Editions of Albinus’ work on Plato haye been published by 
Schneider (Ind. Lect., Breslau, 1852), and K. F. Hermann (in Vol. VI. of his edition of the works of Plato) 


and editions of Alcinous’ work on the same by Orelli (in Alex. Aphrod. de Fato, etc., 1824), and K. F. Her- 
mann (in Vol. VI. of Plato’s works). The philosophical treatises of Plutarch, Apuleius, and Galen are found 


πον ον ΟΝ 


ΨΥ 





THE ECLECTIC PLATONISTS. 935 


in the complete editions of their works, Plutarch’s Moradia in Didot’s collection, edited by Dibner, Paris, 
1841 (as Vols. III. and LY. of his works), and separately, ed. Wyttenbach (Oxford, 1795-1830, Leips. 1796- 
1834). On Calvisius Taurus, cf. Bézier, La Philosophie de Taurus, Havre, 1869. On the philosophical 
opinions of Galen, cf. Kurt Spengel, Beitr. zur Gesch. der Medecin, I. 117-195. On Celsus, the opponent 
of Christianity, cf. F. A. Philippi, De Celsi, adversarii Christianorum, philosophandi genere, Berlin, 
1836, C. W. Bindemann, Veber Celsus und seine Schrift gegen die Christen, in the Zeitschr. fiir hist. 
Theol., 1842, G. Baumgarten-Crusius, De Scriptoribus saeculi, I. p. chr., qui novam religionem impug- 
narunt, Meissen, 1845, Redepenning, Orig., Vol. II., Bonn, 1846, pp. 130-156, F. Chr. Baur, Das Christen- 
thum in den drei ersten Jahrh., pp. 368-395, and Von Engelhardt, Celsus oder die Glteste kritik bib:. 
Gesch. τι. christl. Lehre vom Standpunkte des Heidenthums, in the Dorpater Zeitschr. f. Th. u. Kirche, 
Vol. XI. 1869, pp. 257-344. 


Eudorus of Alexandria (about 25 B. c.) wrote commentaries on the Timaeus of Plato 
and also on works of Aristotle, and a work on the Parts of Philosophy (διαίρεσις τοῦ κατὰ 
φιλοσοφίαν λόγου), in which (as in the Pseudo-Plutarchie Placita Philos., a work founded, as 
is likely, in part on the works of Eudorus and Arius) the views of different philosophers 
on the various problems (προβλήματα) of philosophy are brought together (Plutarch, 
De Anim. Procreat., 3; Simplic., Ad Arist. Categ., Schol., ed. Br., p. 61a, 25 et al. ; Stob., 
Fcl., ΤΙ. 46 seq.). This Platonist wrote also concerning the Pythagorean doctrine (Simplic., 
in Phys., 39 a, where, notwithstanding the duality of the elements assumed by the Pytha- 
goreans, namely, the number One and the “indefinite duad,” the doctrine is ascribed to 
them that the One is the principle of all things). 

Arius Didymus, a learned Academic of the time of Augustus and a pupil of Antiochus 
of Ascalon, wrote περὶ τῶν ἀρεσκόντων Πλάτωνι and other works (Euseb., Pr. Ev., ΧΙ. 23; 
XV. 15 seq.). Stobzus cites (Florileg., 103. 28) “from the Zpitome of Didymus,” a pas- 
sage concerning the Peripatetic doctrine of Hudaemonia, and his account of the Peripatetic 
Ethics (£cl., II. pp. 242-334), in which this passage is again cited, and also his account of 
the Stoic doctrine, and other things, which were probably taken from the Epitome of Arius 
(see Meineke, as above cited, and Zeller, Ph. d. Gr., III.a, 2d ed., 1865, p. 546). In this 
account the Peripatetic Ethics is assimilated to that of the Stoics, in the same manner 
in which, according to Cicero, this was done by Antiochus of Ascalon. Didymus wrote 
also περὶ Πυθαγορικῆς φιλοσοφίας. 

Thrasyllus, known as the arranger of the Platonic dialogues, was a grammarian, who 
lived in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, and died a. Ὁ. 36, while holding the office 
of astrologer to the latter. He combined with Platonism a Neo-Pythagorean numerical 
speculation and the practice of magic, after the manner of the Chaldeans. Schol. in Juven., 
VI. 576: Thrasyllus multarum artium scientiam professus postremo se dedit Platonicae sectae, 
et deinde mathesi, qua praecipue viguit apud Tiberium. The mathesis here spoken of was a 
superstitious, mystical doctrine, founded on speculations with numbers, and combined with 
astrology. Albinus (Introd. in Platon. Dialogos, ch. 6), names, besides Thrasyllus, Dercyllides, 
as one of the authors of the division of the Platonic dialogues into Tetralogies; the first 
tetralogy, at least (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo), was arranged by Dercyllides. Ac- 
eording to Porphyry, ap. Simplic. ad Arist. Phys., f. 54 (Schol., ed. Brandis, p. 344 a), Dercyl- 
lides composed a work on Plato’s philosophy, in the eleventh book of which he cited, from 
Hermodorus on Plato, a passage representing that Plato reduced matter, and the infinite 
or indefinite, to the More and Less (Magnitude and Smallness, etc.). The problem here 
discussed relates to one of the most important points of contact between Platonism and 
Pythagoreanism. 

Theon of Smyrna (in the second century A. D.) wrote a work, which is still extant, 
explaining the mathematical doctrine of Plato (ed. Bullialdus, Paris, 1644; ed. J. J. de 
Gelder, Leyden, 1827; ejusdem Lib. de Astronomia, ed. Th. H. Martin, Paris, 1849). He 


236 THE ECLECTIC PLATONISTS. 


was more a mathematician than a philosopher. His astronomical doctrines were for the 
most part borrowed from a work by Adrastus the Peripatetic. 

Plutarch of Chzeronea (born about 50, died about 125 a. D.), a pupil of Ammonius of 
Alexandria, who taught at Athens under Nero and Vespasian, developed his philosophical 
opinions in the form of an exposition of passages from Plato. In this exposition he be- 
lieved that he had reproduced Plato’s meaning, and only that, just as subsequently the 
Neo-Platonists believed in regard to their work; but his doctrines are far less removed 
from pure Platonism than theirs. He opposed the monism of the Stoics, and had recourse 
to the Platonic hypothesis of two cosmical principles, namely, God, as the author of all 
good, and matter, as the condition of the existence of evil. For the formation of the 
world it was necessary, he taught, that the ‘‘monad” (μονάς) should be combined with the 
‘indefinite duad” (δυὰς ἀόριστος), or the form-giving with the form-receiving principle. 
The Ideas, according to him, were intermediate between God and the world; matter was 
the chaotic substrate of creation, the ideas were the patterns and God the efficient cause 
(ἡ μὲν οὖν ὕλῃ τῶν ὑποκειμένων ἀτακτότατόν ἐστιν" ἡ δ᾽ ἰδέα TOV παραδειγμάτων κάλλιστον " 
ὁ δὲ ϑεὸς τῶν αἰτίων ἄριστον, Quaest. Conv., VIII. 2. 4). God's essence is unknown to us 
(De Pyth. Orac., 20); he sees, but is not seen (De 18. et Osir., 15), he is one and free from 
all differentiation (ἑτερότης), he is the existent (ὃν), and has no genesis (De EI apud Delph. 
20; De 15. et Osir., 18). Only God’s workings can be known by us. In itself matter is not 
bad, but indifferent; it is the common place for good and evil; there is in it a yearning 
after the divine; but it also contains another principle, the evil world-soul, which coexists 
with the good one, and is the cause of all disorderly motions in the world (De Js., 45 seq. ; 
De An. Procreat., ch. 6 seq.). The gods are good. Of the demons (who are necessary as 
mediators between the divine and human), some are good and others are evil; in the 
human soul both qualities are combined. Besides the one supreme God, Plutarch recog- 
nizes as real the popular divinities of the Hellenic and Non-Hellenic faiths. The moral 
element in Plutarch is elevated and without asperity. 

Maximus of Tyre, who lived about one half-century after Plutarch, was more favorable 
to Syncretism in religion and to a superstitious demonology. 

Apuleius of Madaura, born probably between 126 and 132 a. D., taught that, besides 
God, the Ideas and Matter were the original principles of things. He discriminates as 
belonging to the sphere of the supra-sensible, or truly existent, God and his reason, which 
contains the ideal forms, and the soul; from these are contradistinguished all that is sen- 
sible or material. The belief in demons receives the same favor from him as from Maxi- 
mus. The third book of his work De Dogmate Platonis contains logical theorems, in which 
Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines are blended together. Marcianus Capella, who between 
A. D. 330 and 439 (and probably between 410 and 439) wrote a manual of the “seven 
liberal arts” (edited by Franz Eyssenhardt, Leipsic, 1866), also Isidorus, (see below, § 88), 
borrowed much from this work of Apuleius. 

Alcinous, who lived probably at about the same time with Apuleius, likewise names 
in his outline of the Platonic teaching (εἰς τὰ τοῦ Πλάτωνος δόγματα sicaywyy), God, the 
ideas, and matter as the first principles. He uncritically mixes Aristotelian and Stoic with 
Platonic opinions. 

Albinus (whose instruction Galenus sought at Smyrna, in 151-152 a. D.) wrote an in- 
troduction to the Platonic Dialogues, which is of little value, and also commentaries on 
some of the works of Plato. Cf. Alberti, Ueber des Alb. Isagoge, in the Rh. Mus., new series, 
XIII. pp. 76-110. 

Severus, from whose writings Eusebius (Pr. Ev., XIII. 17) has preserved us a frag- 
ment, combated single doctrines of Plato. In particular, he denied the genesis of the world 





ee -, οὐρα  εεινουδξινν τῶ δὴ 


a, 


~~ 





THE ECLECTIC PLATONISTS. 237 


(Proch. in Tim., 11. 88), and affirmed the soul to be simple, like a mathematical figure, anc 
not compounded of two substances, the one capable the other incapable of being actec 
upon. With his Platonism were blended Stoic doctrines. 

Calvisius Taurus (who taught at Athens about 150 a. D.) wrote against the Stoics and 
on the difference between the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle (A. Gellius, N. A., XII. 5; 
Suidas, 8. v, Ταῦρος). Gellius (born about 130), who was his pupil (in about the year 160), 
often mentions him. 

Atticus (said to have flourished about 176 a. p.) opposed the combination of Platonic 
with Aristotelian doctrines, and disputed violently against Aristotle (Euseb., Praep. v., 
XI. 1 et αἰ). He held to the literal sense of the Timaeus (especially as to the doctrine 
of the temporal origin of the world). In his interpretation of the ethics of Plato, he 
seems to have assimilated it to that of the Stoics. A pupil of Atticus was Harpocratiop 
(Procl., in Tim., 11. 93). . 

Claudius Galenus (in the second half of the second century), the well-known teacher of 
medicine, cultivated also philosophy, and occupied himself with the minute exposition of 
works of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Chrysippus. Galenus extols philosophy (which 
with him is identical with religion) as the greatest of divine goods (Protrept., ch. 1). In 
logic he follows Aristotle. The fourth syllogistic figure, named after him, was not first 
brought to light or “discovered” by him, but was obtained by a repartition into two 
figures of the modes included by Theophrastus and Eudemus in the first figure. In meta- 
physics, Galenus added to the four Aristotelian principles, matter, form, moving cause, and 
final cause, a fifth principle, namely, the instrument or means (δ οὐ), which by (Plato and) 
Aristotle, as it appears, had been subsumed under the concept of the moving cause. With 
all his inclination to assent to the Platonic views respecting the immateriality of the soul, 
he was unable, in regard to this question, and, in general, in regard to all questions which 
conduct beyond the limits of experience, to overcome his tendency to doubt. The thing of 
principal importance, in his estimation, was to have a religious conviction of the existence 
of the gods and of an over-ruling providence. 

Celsus (perhaps about 200), the opponent of Christianity, whose arguments were con- 
troverted by Origen, was a Platonist; he cannot have been an Epicurean. He does not 
deny the influence of the gods on the world, but only that God works directly on the 
world of sense. In antagonism to the divine causality stands that of matter, which latter 
is the source of an irresistible physical necessity. From this Celsus is to be distinguished 
the Epicurean of the same name, who lived about 170 a. p., and is mentioned by Lucian in 
the Pseudomantis. 

Numenius of Apamea in Syria, who lived in the second half of the second century 
after Christ, combined Pythagorean and Platonic opinions in such manner that, while him- 
self conceding to Pythagoras the highest authority and asserting that Plato borrowed the 
essential parts of his teachings from him, he made in fact the Platonic element predominant 
in his doctrine. Numenius traces the philosophy of the Greeks back to the wisdom 
of the Orientals, and calls Plato an Attic-speaking Moses (Μωυσῆς ἀττικίζων, Clem. Alex., 
Strom., I. 342; Euseb., Praep. Ev., XI. 10). He was without doubt well acquainted with 
the doctrines of Philo and with the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy in general. He wrote, 
among other things, περὶ τῶν Πλάτωνος ἀποῤῥήτων, περὶ τἀγαθοῦ, and περὶ τῆς τῶν ᾿Ακαδη- 
μαϊκῶν πρὸς Πλάτωνα διαστάσεως (Euseb., Pr. Ev., ΧΙΠ. δ; XIV. 5). The most note- 
worthy deviation of Numenius from Plato (but which was not recognized by him as such) 
consists in this: that he (following, perhaps, the precedent of the Christian Gnostics, espe- 
cially the Valentinians, and indirectly influenced by the distinction made by the Jewish- 
Alexandrian philosophers between God himself and his power working in the world, the 


938 NEO-PLATONIC SCHOOLS. 


Logos) distinguished the world-builder (δημιουργός) as a second God, from the highest deity. 
The first God is good in and through himself; he is pure thought-activity (νοῦς) and the 
principle of being (οὐσίας ἀρχή, Euseb., Pr. Ev., XI. 22). The second God (ὁ δεύτερος θεός 
ὁ δημιουργὸς θεός) is good by participation in the essence of the first (μετουσία tov πρώτου): 
he looks toward the supersensuous archetypes and thereby acquires knowledge (ἐπιστήμη); 
he works upon matter and thus forms the world, he being the principle of genesis or 
becoming (γενέσεως ἀρχή). The world, the production of the Demiurgos, is the third 
God. Numenius terms the three Gods, respectively, father, son, and grandson (πάππος, 
ἔκγονος, and ἀπόγονος, Procl., in Plat. Tim., II. 93). Numenius ascribes this doctrine not 
only to Plato, but also even to Socrates (Euseb., Pr. Hv., XIV. 5). The descent of the soul 
from its incorporeal pre-existent condition into the body implies, according to him, pre- 
vious moral delinquency. Cronius, who is often named in connection with Numenius, 
and is described by Porphyry (De Antro Nymph., 21) as his friend (ἑταῖρος), seems to have 
shared with him in his opinions. He gave to the Homeric poems an allegorical and mythi- 
cal interpretation. Harpocration also followed Numenius in his doctrine of the three 
highest gods. 

The writings of the pretended Hermes Trismegistus (ed. Gust. Parthey, Berlin, 1854: 
ef., respecting him, Baumgarten-Crusius, Progr., Jena, 1827; B. J. Hilgers, Bonn, 1855, 
and Louis Ménard, Hermes Trismégiste, traduction complete, précédee d’une etude sur Vorigine 
des livres hermétiques, Paris, 1866, 2d ed., 1868), which in religious and philosophical 
regards bear an entirely syncretistic character, belong to the time of Neo-Platonism. 


§ 66. Among the adherents of Neo-Platonism, a system founded on 
the principle of the transcendence of the Deity, and in which, not- 
withstanding its filiation upon Plato, the whole of philosophical science 
was brought under a new systematic form, belong, 1) the Alexandrian- 
Roman school of Ammonius Saccas, the originator of the whole Neo- 
Platonic movement, and of Plotinus, who was the first to develop the 
system on all its sides, 2) the Syrian School of Jamblichus, who fa- 
vored a fantastical theurgy, 3) the Athenian school of the younger 
Plutarch, and of Syrianus, and of Proclus and his successors,—in 
whose doctrines the theoretical element became again predominant,— 
together with the later Neo-Platonic commentators. 


On Neo-Platonism in general may be compared the essays or works of G. Olearius (annexed to his 
translation of Stanley’s History of Philosophy, Leips. 1711, p. 1205 seq.), J. A. Dietelmaier (Programma, quo 
seriem veterum in schola Alewandrina doctorum exponit, Altd. 1146), the Histoire critique de U eclecti- 
cisme ou des nowveax Platoniciens (Avign. 1766), Meiners (Leips. 1782), Keil (Leips. 1785), Oelrichs (Marb. 
1788), Fiilleborn (in Beitr. zwr Gesch. d. Ph., 111. 8. Ὁ. 70 seq.). 1. H. Fichte (De Philos. Novae Platon. Origine. 
Berlin, 1818), F. Bouterwek (Philosophorum Alerandrinorum ac Neoplatonicorum recensio accuratior, 
in Comm. Soc. Reg. Gotting. rec., vol. V., pp. 227-258, Gottingen, 1821). Tzschirner (Der Fall des Heiden- 
thames, Leips. 1829), K. Vogt (Neoplatonismus und Christenthum, Berlin, 1836), Matter (Sur école @ Alew- 
andrie, Paris, 1820, 2d ed., 1840-48), Jules Simon (Histoire de Uécole d’Al., Paris, 1843-45, cf. Emile Saisset 
in Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1, 1844), J. Barthélemy St. Hilaire (Swr 16 concours ouvert par Ul Acad. 
des sciences morales et politiques sur Vécole d Alerandrie, Paris, 1845), E. Vacherot (/istoire critique 
de Técole dAl., Paris, 1846-51), Steinhart (Newplat. Philosophie, in Panly’s Real-encycl. des class. Alter- 
thums). Cf., also, Heinr. Kellner, Hellenismus und Christenthwm oder die geistliche Reaction des antiken 
Heidenthums gegen das Christenthwm, Cologne, 1865, and Franz Hipler, Newplaton. Studien, in the 
Viertejahrechr, fiir kath. Theol., Vienna, 1868 (and separately). 


AMMONIUS SACCAS AND HIS PUPILS. 239 


Τὸ will scarcely be necessary to remark that the Neo-Platonic philosophy, although it 
sprung up after Christianity, belongs in its characteristics to the pre-Christian era. 


§ 67. The founder of Neo-Platonism was Ammonius Saceas, the 
teacher of Plotinus. Ammonius expounded his doctrine only orally, 
and its exact relation to that of Plotinus cannot be determined with 
certainty. The affirmation that no essential difference existed be- 
tween the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle is referred to him; yet 
the correctness of this reference is also uncertain. 

Of the disciples of Ammonius, the most important, after Plotinus, 
are Origen the Neo-Platonist, Origen Adamantius the Christian, 
Erennius, and Longinus the philologist. 


Dehaut, Zssai historique sur la vie et la doctrine d Ammonius Saccas, Brussels, 1836. G. A. Heigl, 
Der Bericht des Porphyrius tiber Origenes, Regensburg, 1835. Dionys. Longinus: De Sublimitate, ed. 8. 
F. N. Morus, Leips. 1769, ed. B. Weiske, Leips. 1809. Longini vel Dionysii περὶ ὕψους ed. L. Spengel, in 
Rhetores Graeci, 1. Leips. 1853; ed. Otto Jahn, Bonn, 1867. Longini quae supersunt, ed. Weiske, Oxford, 
1820; ed. A. E. Egger, Paris, 18387; Day. Ruhnken, Diss. de Vita et scriptis Longini, Leyden, 1776, also 
in his Opusc., Leyden, 1S07, pp. 806-347. E. Egger, Longin est-il véritablement Cauteur du traité du 
sublime ?—in Egger’s Essai sur Chistoire de la critique chez les Grecs, Paris, 1849, pp. 524-533. Louis 
Vaucher, Etudes critiques sur le Traité du Sublime, Geneva, 1854. Emil Winkler, De Longini qui 
JSertur libello w.v., Halle, 1870. 


Ammonius, who lived about 175-250 A. D., was brought up by his parents in the 
belief of Christianity, but returned afterward to the Hellenic faith (Porphyr., ap. Euseb. 
Hist. Eccl., VI. 19: ᾿Αμμώνιος μὲν yap Χριστιανὸς ἐν Χριστιανοῖς ἀνατραφεὶς τοῖς γονεῦσιν, 
ὅτε τοῦ φρονεῖν καὶ τῆς φιλοσοφίας ἥψατο, εὐθὺς πρὸς τὴν κατὰ νόμους πολιτείαν μετεβάλετο). 
The surname Σακκᾶς (the sack-bearer) was derived from the occupation by which Ammo- 
nius originally gained his living. Later writers (notably Hierocles) gave him the surname 
θεοδίδακτος (divinely taught). The report that he declared the Platonic and Aristotelian 
doctrines essentially identical, originated with Hierocles (ap. Phot., Bibl. Cod., 214, p. 172, 
173 Ὁ; Cod. 251, p. 461] 4, Bekk.); Hierocles belonged to the Athenian school of Neo-Plato- 
nists, who, perhaps, only imputed to Ammonius their own desire to reconcile the teachings 
of the two philosophers. Nemesius (De Nat. Hom., ch. 2) makes some statements con- 
cerning the doctrine of Ammonius respecting the immateriality of the soul; still, it may be 
questioned whether he has not ascribed to Ammonius opinions held by others. Whether 
the doctrine that the One, the absolutely Good, is exterior to the world of Ideas and the 
divine understanding—a doctrine of fundamental importance in the system of Plotinus— 
was already enunciated by Ammonius, is uncertain. It was (according to Procl., Theol. 
Plat., 11. 4, init.) not held by Origen, the condisciple of Plotinus; what was the position of 
Longinus on this point cannot be determined, since the point disputed between him and 
Longinus, whether the Ideas subsist outside the Nous, is not necessarily connected with 
the one now in question. 

That Origen the Christian is to be distinguished from Origen the Neo-Platonist 
(although G. A. Heigl asserts their identity), is beyond doubt; for the works of the Chris- 
tian Church-Father were known by Porphyry (Euseb., Hist. Eecl., VI. 19), who complains 
of his adherence to Christianity in spite of his Hellenic education (Ὠριγένης δὲ “Ἕλλην ἐν 
Ἔλλησι παιδευθεὶς λόγοις πρὸς τὸ βάρβαρον ἐξώκειλε τόλμημα), and yet says of Origen the 
Platonist, that (apart, from his commentary on the Prooemium of the Platonic Timaeus, 


240 PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 


which Proclus mentions, ad Plat. Theol., II. 4) he wrote only on the two following subjects : 
περὶ δαιμόνων and ὅτι μόνος ποιητὴς ὁ βασιλεύς (Porphyr., Vita Plotini, ch. 3). The latter 
work treated, it is most probable, of the identity of the world-builder with the supreme 
God. (Cf. G. Helferich, Unters. aus dem Gebiet der class. Alterthumswiss. G.-Pr., Heidel- 
berg, 1860.) Origen the Christian (185-254 A.D.) appears to have attended the school 
of Ammonius in about the year 212. 

Porphyry relates (Vita Plotini, ch. 2) that “Erennius, Origen, and Plotinus made a 
mutual promise not to divulge the doctrine of Ammonius; but, Erennius haying broken 
this agreement, Origen and Plotinus felt themselves also no longer bound by it; still, 
Plotinus wrote nothing till quite late in life.” Of Erennius, tradition says that he explained 
the term ‘‘ metaphysics” as denoting what lies beyond the sphere of nature (see Brandis in 
the Abh. d. Berl. Akad., 1831, p. 34 seq.), 

Longinus (213-273 A. D.), known as a grammarian and writer on esthetics, upheld, in 
opposition to Plotinus and his followers, the doctrine that the ideas exist separate from 
the Nous. Porphyry also, who was for a time a pupil of Longinus, sought, in a work 
directed against Plotinus, to demonstrate the same doctrine (ὅτε ἔξω τοῦ νοῦ ὑφέστηκε τὰ 
νοητά), but was afterward led by Amelius to abandon it, whereupon he was attacked by 
Longinus (Porphyr., Vit. Plot., ch. 18 seq.). At a still later period Plotinus admitted that 
Longinus was still the ablest critic of his times ( Vita Plot., ch. 20: τοῦ καϑ' ἡμᾶς κριτικωτάτον 
γενομένου); but he contended (perhaps because Longinus, in opposition to him, insisted on 
the—real or supposed—literal sense of the Platonic writings) that he was only a philol- 
ogist and no philosopher (ap. Porphyr., Vita Plotin., ch.14: φιλόλογος μὲν ὁ Aoyyiroc, 
φιλόσοφος δὲ οὐδαμῶς). This judgment was, at all events, too severe. It is true that Lon- 
ginus did not, like Plotinus, contribute to the positive development of theosophy. But he 
participated, nevertheless, in the philosophical investigations connected with this subject, 
and really enriched the science of zesthetics by his work on the Sublime (epi ὕψους), which 
is full of fine and just observations. 


§ 68. Plotinus (204-269 a. p.), who first developed the Neo- 
Platonic doctrine in systematic form, or, at least, was the first to put 
it in writing, was educated at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas, 
and afterward (from a. p. 244 on) taught at Rome. His works were 
revised in point of style by Porphyry, and published in six Enneads. 

Plotinus agrees with Plato in the doctrine of “sensibles” (aio- 
θητά) and “intelligibles” (νοητά) and intermediate or psychical na- 
tures. But he differs from him radically (though unconsciously—for 
Plotinus believed that his own doctrine was contained in Plato’s 
writings), inasmuch as he teaches that the One or the Good, which 
with Plato was the highest of the Ideas, is elevated above the sphere 
of the Ideas and above all the objects of rational apprehension, and 
that the Ideas, to which Plato ascribed independent existence, are 
emanations from this “ One,” the soul an emanation from the Ideas, 
and so on, the Sensible being the last in the series of emanations; 
he differs from him, further, in teaching that the Ideas are in the 
Nous, while Plato in the Zimaeus, with a phraseology which indi. 








PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 241 


cates a wavering between the tendency to poetic personification and 
the dogmatic, doctrinal tendency, styles the Ideas gods and the 
highest Idea the Idea of the Good, the highest god; and the author 
of the Sophistes ascribes to them, in unqualified, dogmatic form, mo- 
tion, life, and reason. 

The primordial essence, the original unity, the One (ἔν) or the 
Good (ἀγαθόν), is neither reason nor an object of rational cognition 
(neither νοῦς nor νοητόν), because excluded, by virtue of its absolute 
unity, from and exalted above both the terms thus contrasted. From 
the excess of its energy it sends forth an image of itself, in like manner 
as the sun emits rays from itself. This image, turning with an inyol- 
untary movement toward its original, in order to behold it, becomes 
thus Nous, mind (νοῦς). In this Nous the Ideas are immanent, not 
however as mere thoughts, but as substantially existent and essential 
parts of itself. They constitute in their unity the Nous, just as the 
theorems of a science constitute in their unity that science. It is to 
them that true being and life really belong. The same ideal reality is 
thus at once the truly existent or the true object of knowledge, and 
knowing subject or Reason; in the former aspect it is considered as 
at rest, in the latter, as in motion or active. The Nous in turn pro- 
duces as its image the soul, which exists in it, as itself exists in the 
One. The soul has affinities both for the ideal and the sensible. The 
body is in the soul, and depends on it; but the soul, on the contrary, 
is absolutely separable from the body, not only in respect of its 
thinking power, but also in its lower faculties, memory and sensuous 
perception, and even in the formative force through which it molds 
and builds up its material environment. It precedes and survives the 
body. The matter, which is in the objects of sensuous perception, is 
only generically similar to the matter, which is in the Ideas (ὦ. ¢., both 
fall under the same general concept of matter); but the former is 
specifically differentiated from the latter by the attributes of extension 
in space and solidity. The former is μὴ ὄν, non-existent, essenceless, 
and can only be reduced to form and order by higher forces, non- 
derivable from itself. The forms and the formative forces, the 
powers of nature (λόγοι), which enter into 1t, come from the Ideas, 
or the Nous. The same categories are not applicable to the ideal 
and the sensible. The business of man is to return to God, whom 
he, as a sensuous being, has estranged from himself. The means 
by which this return is to be accomplished are virtue, philosophic 

16 


242 PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 


thought, and, above all, the immediate, ecstatic intuition of God and 
the becoming one with Him. 

Of the disciples of Plotinus, the most noteworthy are Amelius, 
one of his earliest disciples, and Porphyry, the reviser, arranger, and 
editor of his works. 


The works of Plotinus were first published in the Latin translation of Marsilius Ficinus (Florence, 
1492; Saligniaci, 1540: Basel, 1559), and then in Greek and Latin (Basel, 1580, 1615); editions with the trans- 
lation of Ficinus annexed have been published by Dan. Wyttenbach, G. H. Moser, and Fr. Creuzer (Ox- 
ford, 1835), by Creuzer and Moser (Paris, 1855), and by A. Kirchhoff (Leips. 1856). Plotinus’ treatises on 
the virtues and against the Gnostics were edited and published by Kirchhoffin 1847, and the latter of those 
works, by Heigl (Regensb. 1882). Hnn.I. 6, has been published separately by Creuzer: Plotini Lib. de 
Pulchritudine, Heidelb. 1814. The eighth book of the third Ennead (concerning nature, contemplation, 
and the One) has been translated and explained by Creuzer (in Daub und Creuzer’s Studien, Vol. I., Heidelb. 
1805, pp. 23-103), the first Ennead, by J. G. V. Engelhardt (Erlangen, 1820). Parts of Plotinus’ works havo 
been translated into English by Th, Taylor (London, 1787, 1794, 1817), and all have been translated into 
French and provided with a commentary by Bouillet (Paris, 1857-60). 

Of modern works on Plotinus we name those of Gott]. Wilh. Gerlach (Disp. de differentia, quae inter 
Plotini et Schellingii doctrinam de numnine summo intercedit, Witt., 1811), Lindeblad (Plot. de Pulchro, 
Lund, 1830), Steinhart (De dial. Plotini ratione, Halle, 1829; Meletemuta Plotiniana, diss. Port., Naum- 
burg, 1840; and Art. Plotin, in Pauly’s Real-enc. d. cl. Alt.), Ed. Miller (in his Gesch. der Theorie der 
Kunst bei den Alten, I1., pp. 286-315, Berlin, 1887), J. A. Neander (Ueber Ennead. I].9: Gegen die 
Gnostiker, in the Abh. der Berl. Akad., Berlin, 1843, p. 299 seq.), F. Creuzer (in the Prolegom. to the Paris 
edition of the works of Plotinus), Ferd. Gregorovius (in Fichte’s Zeitschr. f. Ph., XXVI., pp. 112-147), 
Rob. Zimmermann (Gresch. der Aesth., Vienna, 1858, pp. 122-147), C. Herm. Kirchner (Die Philosophie 
des Plotin, Halle, 1854), Starke (Plotini de amore sententia, Neu-Ruppin, 1854), R. Volkmann (Die Hohe 
der antiken Aesthetik, oder Plotin’s Abh. vom Schénen, Stettin, 1860), Emil Brenning (Die Lehre vom 
Schénen bei Plotin, im Zusammenhange seines Systems dargestellt, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der 
Aesthetik, Gottingen, 1864), A. J. Vitringa (De egregio quod in rebus corporeis constituit Plotinus 
pulechri principio, Amst. 1864), Valentiner (Plotin und seine Enneaden nebst Uebersctzung von Enn. 
IT, 9., in Studien und Kritiken, 1864, p. 118 seq.), Arthur Richter (Newplat. Studien ; Left 1: tiber Leben 
und Geistesentwickelung des Plotin; Heft 2: Plotin’s Lehre vom Sein und die metaphys. Grundlage 
seiner Philosophie; Heft 8: die Theologie und Physik des Plotin; Heft 4: die Psychologie des Plotin ; 
ΠΕ 5: die Ethik des Plotin, Halle, 1864-67), Herm. Ferd. Miller (£thices Plotinianae lineamenta 
Diss., Berlin, 1867), E. Grucker (De Plotinianis libris, qui inscribuntur περὶ τοῦ καλοῦ et περὶ τοῦ νοητοῦ 
κάλλους, Diss., Strasbourg and Paris, 1866). 

Porphyrit Vita Plotini, composed in 803, appeared first in connection with the Basel editions of the 
Enneads in 1580 and 1615, then in Fabric. Bibl. Gr., LV. 2, 1711, pp. 91-147, and in the Oxford edition of 
the Enneads in 1885, but not in the Paris edition, again in Kirchoff’s edition, Leips. 1856, and in Cobet’s 
Diog. Laert., Paris, 1850, append. pp. 102-118, ed. Ant. Westermann. Porphyrii Vit. Pyth. ed. Kiessling, 
in the ed. of Jambl. de Vit. Pythagorica, Leips. 1815-16; ed. Westermann, in Cobet’s Diog. L., Paris, 
1850, app. pp. 87-101. Porphyrii ἀφορμαὶ πρὸς τὰ νοητά, ed. L. Holstenius, with the Vita Pythag., Rome, 
1630, and in the Paris edition of Plotinus (1855). Porphyr. Epist. de Diis Daemonibus ad Anebonem, in 
connection with Jambl. de Myst., Venice, 1497, and in Gale’s ed. of the same work, Oxford, 1678. Por- 
phyr. de quinque vocibus sive in categor. Aristotelis introductio, Paris, 1543; the same is prefixed to most 
editions of the Organon, and is published in Vol. III. of the Berl. Akad.’s edition of Aristotle. Ponphyr. 
de abstinentia ab esu animaliwm l. quatuor, ed. Jac. de Rhoer, Utrecht, 1767. Porphyr. epist.ad Marcel. 
lam, ed. Angelus Maius, Milan, 1816 and 1831, ed. J. C. Orellius,in Opusc. Graec. Sententiosa, tom. I., Leips. 
1819. Porphyrii de philosophia ex oraculis haurienda librorum reliquiae, ed. Gust. Wolff, Berlin, 
1856; οἵ, G. Wolff, De novissima oraculorum aetate, Berlin, 1854; Porphyr. de abstinentia et de antro 
nympharum, ed. Tead. Hercher (together with Aelian’s De Nat. Animazi., ete.), Paris, 1858; Porph. philos. 
Platonici opuscula tria rec., Aug. Nauck, Leips. 1860; Ullmann, Parallelen aus den Schriften des Por- 
phyr's zu neutest. Stellen, in the Theol. Stud. τι. Krit., V. 1, 1832, pp. 876-3894. On Porphyry, ef. Lucas 
Holsten (De vit. et scr. P., in the preface to his editions of Porphyry’s works, Rome, 1630, Cambridge, 1655, 
andin Fabric. Bibl. Gr., ΤΥ. p. 2, ch. 27), Brandis (Abh. d. Berl. Ak. d. Wiss., ph.-hist. Cl., 1833, p. 219 seq.), 
and Gust. Wolff (Ueber das Leben des Porphyr und die Abfassungszeit seiner Schriften, prefixed to Wolff's 
ed. of Porph. de philos. ex oraculis, ete., pp. T-13, 14-37); on his rank among the representatives of Neo- 





PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 248 





, Platonism, cf. N. Bouillet (Porphyre, son réle dans Vécole néoplatonicienne, sa lettre ἃ Marcella, traduite 

& en fr., Extr. dela Reoue Crit. et Bibliogr., Paris, March, 1864): on his relation to Christianity, see Kellner 

5 (in Kuhn’s Theol. Quartalschr., 1865, No. 1), Jak. Bernays (Theophrastos Schrift tiber Frimmigkeit, ein 
Beitrag zur MReligionsgeschichte, mit kritischen und erklirenden Bemerkungen zu Porphyrios Schrift 
iver Enthaltsamkeit, Berlin, 1866), and Adolf Schafer (De Porphyr in Plat. Tim. commentario, Diss., 
Bonn, 1863). Porphyr von der Enthaltsamkeit, a. ἃ. Griech. m. Anm., by E. Baltzer, Nordhausen, 1869. 


The native city of Plotinus was Lycopolis in Egypt (Eunap., Vit. Soph., p. 6, Boiss. 
| et al.). He himself was unwilling even to name his birthplace or his parents, or the time 
of his birth, for, says Porphyry, his disciple (Vit. Plot., ch. 1), he despised these as terres- 
| trial matters, and he seemed to be ashamed of being in the body. Porphyry states (ἰδία, 
ch. 2) that Plotinus died near the end of the second year of the reign of Claudius (269, 
assuming, aS we may, that the year of his reign began with the civil year; otherwise, 270), 
and that (according to information given to Eustochius, his own fellow-disciple) he was 
᾽ then sixty-six years old; from these data Porphyry derives 204 (205?) as the birth-year of 
Plotinus. In his twenty-eighth year Plotinus applied himself to philosophy, and listened 
to the instructions of the men then famous at Alexandria, but none of them was able to 
satisfy him, till at last he came to Ammonius, in whom he found the teacher he had 
sought. He remained with Ammonius till the year 242 or 243, when he joined himself 
to the expedition of the Emperor Gordian against the Persians, that he might learn the 
Persian philosophy. He was prevented from accomplishing this purpose by the unfortu- 
nate issue of the expedition, and was obliged to flee for his life to Antioch. 

The inference of some historians (Brucker, for example, see above, p. 27) that Plotinus 
was a disciple and adherent of the Potamo who is mentioned in Diog. L., I. 21, as the 
founder of an eclectic sect, is incorrect. Suidas says (5. v. Ποτάμων): Ποτ. ᾿Αλεξανδρεὺς 
γεγονὼς πρὸ Αὐγούστου καὶ μετ’ αὐτόν, “ Potamo, the Alexandrian, living before and after 
the time of Augustus,” and he adds that he was the author of a commentary on Plato's 
Republic. If the statement of Suidas is correct, Diogenes Laértius must simply have 
copied the words of his authority (Diocles) without thought, and the reference in the 
words πρὸ ὀλίγου καὶ ἐκλεκτική τις αἵρεσις εἰσήχθη ὑπὸ Ποτάμωνος must be to the time of 
Augustus. This Potamo appears to be identical with the person mentioned by Plutarch 
(Alex., 61) as ‘‘ Potamo the Lesbian,” one of the teachers of Sotion the Sextian. 

At the age of forty years (243 or 244 A.D.) Plotinus went to Rome (Porphyr., Vit. Plot., 
ch. 3). He succeeded there in finding disciples, and, later still, he won over to his doctrine 
the Emperor Gallienus, as also his wife Salonina, so that he ventured to entertain the 
idea of founding, with the approval and support of the Emperor, a philosophers’ city in 
Campania, which was to be called Platonopolis, and whose inhabitants were to live ac- 
cording to the Laws of Plato. He proposed to live in it himself, with his disciples. Gal- 
lienus was not indisposed to grant the philosopher the desired permission, but he was 
dissuaded from so doing by his counselors, and the plan remained unexecuted. Plotinus 
remained in Rome till the first year of the reign of M. Aurelius Claudius (268 A. p.), and 
then retired to Campania, where he died in the year 269, near Minturne, at the country- 
seat of Castricius Firmus, his admirer. 

It is evident from his writings that Plotinus had obtained an exact knowledge of the 
doctrines of all the philosophical schools of the Greeks, by reading their principal works; 
that, in particular, he had studied Aristotle with scarcely less zeal than he had studied 
Plato, is expressly certified by Porphyry (Vita Plot., ch. 14). The works of Numenius 
exerted a powerful influence on him. Porphyry recognizes in Numenius a forerunner of 
Ammonius and Plotinus, but agrees with Amelius and Longinus in repelling the charge 
raised by some against Plotinus, that he merely reproduced the teachings of Numenius; 


a 


244 PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 

\ 
on the contrary, he says, Plotinus developed the Pythagorean and Platonic principles with 
far greater exactness, thoroughness, and distinctness, than any one of his predecessors 
(Vita Plot., chs. 17 seq.; 20 seq.). At the Synousiai Plotinus caused not only the writings 
of the Platonists Severus, Cronius, Numenius, Gaius, and Atticus, but also those of the 
Peripatetics Aspasius, Alexander (of Aphrodisias?), and Adrastus, to be read, and with 
these he connected his own speculations (Porphyr., Vit. Plot., ch. 14). 

Plotinus began the written exposition of his doctrines in his fiftieth year (253 A. p.). 
His manuscript was revised after his death and given to the public by his disciple Por- 
phyry ; yet a few copies made from the original had previously come into the hands of his 
more familiar disciples. There existed also in ancient times an edition by Eustochius, 
respecting which the notice has come down to us that in it the psychological investigations 
contained in Ennead. IV. 3-5, and which belong together, were divided otherwise than in 
the Porphyrian revision, the third chapter coming nearer the commencement of the Er 
nead in the former than in the latter edition. All the manuscripts now extant are based 
on the edition of Porphyry. 

The works of Plotinus lack the artistic form of the Platonic Dialogues, and still more 
their dialectical force; yet they possess a certain attractiveness from the earnest self-abar,- 
donment of the writer to his thought and the unction of his style. Porphyry ascribes ta 
the Plotinic diction terseness and wealth of ideas (σύντονος καὶ πολύνους) and sees in many 
parts rather the language of religious inspiration (τὰ πολλὰ ἐνθουσιῶν καὶ ἐκπαθῶς φράζων) 
than the tone of instruction. Longinus, who combated many of the doctrines of Plotinus, 
confesses, nevertheless (in a letter to Porphyry, given in the latter’s Vita Plotin., ch. 19) his 
high appreciation of the Plotinic style of thought and expression (τὸν δὲ τύπον τῆς γραφῆς 
καὶ τῶν ἐννοιῶν τἀνδρὸς τὴν πυκνότητα καὶ TO φιλόσοφον τῆς τῶν ζητημάτων διαθέσεως ὑπερ- 
βαλλόντως ἄγαμαι καὶ φιλῶ, καὶ μετὰ τῶν ἐλλογιμωτάτων ἄγειν τὰ τούτου βιβλία φαίην ἂν 
δεῖν τοὺς ζητητικούς). 

The subjects of the fifty-four opuscules of Plotinus, which Porphyry arranged together 
in six Hnneads—following, as he himself says ( Vit. Plot., ch. 24), the method of Andronicus 
the Aristotelian, in bringing together those which related to similar subjects, and begin. 
ning with what was easiest to be understood—are the following: 

First Ennead. 1. What is meant by ζῶον, or living being, in general, and the nature of 
man (in chronological order the 53d treatise). 2. Concerning the virtues (chronologically 
the 19th). 3. Concerning dialectic, or on the three steps in the process of rising to the 
intelligible (20). 4. On happiness (46). 5. Whether happiness increases with its duration 
(36). 6. On the beautiful (1). 7. Concerning the first good (primwm bonum) and the 
other goods (54). 8. What objects evils are and what is the origin of evil (561). 9. On the 
unlawfulness of suicide (16). Porphyry designates (Vit. Plot., ch. 24) the topics of the first 
Ennead in general as ethical (τὰ ἠθικώτερα or τὰς ἠθικωτέρας ὑποθέσεις). The place assigned 
to them, however, is in scientific regards inappropriate, and is also scarcely justifiable on 
didactic grounds; for Plotinus everywhere makes the ethical doctrine of the subjective ele- 
vation of the individual to goodness dependent on the previously developed doctrines of 
that which is good in itself, of being and of the soul (ef., in particular, Hnnead. 1. 3, 1 init.). 

Second Ennead (τῶν φυσικῶν συναγωγῇ). 1. On the heavens (40). 2. On the revolution 
of the heavens (14). 3. Whether the stars exert influences (52). 4. On the two kinds 
of matter (12). 5. On potentiality and actuality (25). 6. On quality and essence (17). 
7. On the possibility of complete mixture (37). 8. Why a distant object appears to the 
eye smaller than it really is, while a near one appears with its actual magnitude (35). 
9. Against the (Christian) Gnostics, who give out that the world and its author, or the 
Demiurge, are evil (33). 


Ἐς i 


δῶν τ: 
tg Ne 


ἊΣ 


Π ᾿ 





Jas 


me 





PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 245 


Third Ennead (étt τὰ περὶ κόσμου). 1, On fate (3). 2 and 3. On providence (47 and 
23). 4. Concerning the Demon charged to watch over us (15). 5. Concerning love (50). 
ὃ. On the impassibility of the immaterial (26). 1. Concerning eternity and time (45). 
8. On nature, contemplation, and the One (30). 9. Various considerations respecting the 
relation of the divine Nous to the ideas, and respecting the soul and the One (13).—Por- 
phyry says (Vi. Pl, ch. 25), that he placed the seventh chapter here διὰ τὰ περὲ τοῦ 
χρόνου and the eighth διὰ τὸ περὶ φύσεως κεφάλαιον, but he omits to say anything of the 
other not less important contents of these chapters. 

Fourth Ennead (τὰ περὶ ψυχῆς). 1. On the essence of the soul (4). 2. How the soul 
holds the middle place between indivisible and divisible substance (21). 3-5. On various 
psychological problems (27-29). 6. On sense-perception and memory (41). 17. On the 
soul’s immortality (2). 8. On the descent of the soul into the body (6). 9. On the ques- 
tion, whether all souls are one (8). 

Fifth Ennead (τὰ τερὶ νοῦ). 1. On the three original hypostases: the First Being, the 
Nous, and the Soul (10). 2. On the genesis and order of that which comes after the First 
Being (11). 3. Respecting the cognitive substances and that which is above and beyond 
them (49). 4. Respecting the One and the manner in which all things descend from it (7). 
5. That the νοητά (Intelligibles) do not exist outside of the Nous; also, on the Nous and 
on God as the absolutely good (32). 6. That that which transcends being is not a thinking 
essence, and what it is that possesses thought originally and what possesses it derivatively 
(24). 7. Whether there exist ideas of individual objects (18). 8. Respecting intelligible 
beauty (31). 9. On the Nous, the ideas, and the existent (5).—Porphyry confesses that no 
one of these chapters treats exclusively of the Nous. 

Sixth Ennead (concerning the existent and the Good or the One). 1-3. Of the genera 
of the existent (the Categories) (42-44). 4 and 5. That the existent, since it is one and 
the same, is also everywhere entire (22, 23). 6. On numbers (34). 7. On the plurality of 
the truly existent and concerning the Good (38). 8. On human and divine freedom (39). 
9. On the Good or the One (9). 

The chronological order of these fifty-four treatises is (according to Porphyr., Vit. Plot., 
chs. 4-6) the following: From a. Ὁ. 253 to 262: Enn., 1. 6. (On the beautiful; yet, in 
respect to this one Porph. (ch. 26) expresses himself in doubt), IV. 7, II. 1, 1V. 1, V. 9, 
renee oO, VE, 9; V.1, V. 2, ΤΙ. 4, Til. 9, 1|: 2, I 4,1. 9, IL 6, V- 7, L 4, £3, 
IV. 2. From 262 to 267: VI. 4 and 5, V. 6, II. 5, III. 6, IV. 3-5, III. 8, V. 8, V. 5, II. 9, 
ieee, ΤΕ 7, Vi. 7, VI.8, II. 1, IV. 6, VI. 1-3, ΤΠ. 7. 267-268: 1. 4, DT 2 
and 3, V. 3, III. 5. 268-269: I. 8, 11. 3,I.1, 1.1. Another composition, written at about 
the same time as V. 6, is mentioned by Porphyry (Vit. Plot., ch. 5), but the title is not 
given, and it is not included by Porphyry in any of the Hnneads. 

Philo of Alexandria, the Jew, had introduced the distinction between God and his 
world-building forces, which latter constituted together the divine Logos; Plutarch of 
Chzeronea had treated of God as unknowable in his essence and cognizable only in his 
world-constructing activity; Numenius of Apamea had hypostatized God himself and the 
Demiurge into two different beings, with whom the world was to be classed as a third; 
and Plotinus went further in the like direction. With Plato, he styled the Supreme 
Essence the One, the Good per se, but denied to it—what it still retained in the doctrines 
of Philo and Plutarch—the epithet of Being (τὸ ὅν), for he taught that it transcended 
Being (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, ef. Plat., Rep., VI. 509, see above, p. 122); he also denied to 
it the faculty of thought—in opposition to Numenius—affirming that it was also exalted 
above the rational nature (ἐπέκεινα νοήσεως). 

Plotinus pays particular attention to the demonstration of his fundamental doctrine, 


246 PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 


that the One is exalted above the Nous. The treatise classed by Porphyry as the eighth 
in the third Znnead, but which on didactic grounds might properly be placed at the begin- 
ning of the whole work, opens with the proposition with which the Metaphysics of Aristotle 
begins (‘‘ All men naturally seek after knowledge”), but in a modified and expanded form, 
viz.: “All things tend toward thought” [@ewpia, of which speculation is the etymological 
English equivalent.—7r.]. He first introduces this assertion as a sort of playful proce- 
mium, and then proceeds to justify it by serious and extended argumentation. Nature, he 
says, is the unconscious, or, as it were, the sleeping Logos, and she gives form to matter, 
that she may rejoice in that which she has formed, as in a magnificent drama; the soul of 
the All and the souls of men find their highest end in thought; action is only debility of 
thought (ασθένεια θεωρίας) or a result of it (παρακολούθημα), the former when it takes place 
without previous reflection, the latter when it is preceded by independent thought; for which 
reason, says Plotinus, those boys who are the least gifted, and are too stupid for purely 
intellectual activities, resort to manual labor. Thought can be directed in a rising succes- 
sion to nature, the soul, and the Nous, becoming ever more and more united with the object 
of thought; but there remains ever involved in it the dual distinction of the act of knowing 
and the object of knowledge, and this must be true not only of the human Nous but of every 
Nous, even the divine (παντὶ νῷ συνέζευκται τὸ νοητόν). But duality implies unity, and this 
unity we must seek to discover (εἶ dé δύο, det τὸ πρὸ τῶν dvo λαβειν). The Nous cannot 
itself be the unity sought, since it is necessarily subject to the duality above pointed out. 
Separate the Nous (intellect) from the νοητόν (intelligible) and it will no longer be Nous. 
Hence that which is prior to duality is above and beyond the Nous (τὸ πρότερον των dbo 
τούτων ἐπέκεινα det νοῦ εἰναι). The One can no more be νοητόν than Nous; for the νοητόν 
is also inseparably united with the Nous. If, therefore, it can neither be Nous nor νοητόν, 
it must be that from which each alike is derived. It is not, however, for this reason 
irrational, but supra-rational or transcending reason (ὑπερβεβηκος τὴν νοῦ φόσιν). It is to 
the Nous what light is to the eye (Hnnead. VI. 7). It is more simple than the Nous, since 
the producing is always simpler than the produced. Just as the unity of the plant, of the 
animal, of the soul is the highest element in these existences, so unity in itself is that 
which is absolutely first in ontological regards. It is the principle, the source, and the 
power from which true being descends.—Plotinus here hypostatizes the last result of ab- 
straction, and makes of it a being, existing apart from other beings. He then regards it 
as the principle of that from which it was abstracted, and accordingly identifies it with the 
Deity.—Just as he who has looked at the heavens and seen the lustre of the stars, thinks 
of and seeks to discover the artist who fashioned the heavens, so must he who has beheld 
and known and admired the intelligible world (τὸν νοητὸν κόσμον), seek for its artist, and 
asks who then it is that has called into existence this more glorious world of the Intelli- 
gible (νοητόν) and the Intellect (νοῦς). 

The difference between the fundamental doctrine of Plotinus and the corresponding 
doctrine of Plato is very clearly expressed in the comparisons instituted by each. Plato 
compares the idea of the good, as the highest in the world of ideas, to the sun, as that 
which is highest in the sensible world; Plotinus compares the same idea as the creatria of 
the ideal world to the creator of the sensible world. With another application of the Pla- 
tonic figure, Plotinus compares the One to light, the Nous to the sun, and the soul to the 
moon (Hnnead. V. 6. 4). Plotinus, nevertheless, believed himself in agreement not only 
with Plato, but also with the oldest philosophers. He says (Hnnead. V.1. 8) that with 
Plato the Nous was the Demiurgos, hence the Cause (αἴτιον), but that Plato maintained 
the existence of a father to this Cause, and that this father was the Good (τάγαθόν), which 
is superior to both reason and being (τὸ ἐπέκεινα νοῦ καὶ ἐπέκεινα οὐσίας). Plato, he con 


> 


PLOTINUS. AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 247 


tinues, applies the term Idea to Being and Nous, and must, therefore, have considered the 
idea as having the Good for its source. Plotinus overlooks, in this connection, the fact 
that Plato terms the Good, in some places, “‘ the Idea of the Good,” an expression which is 
avoided by Plotinus, who, on the contrary, distinctly affirms that the principle of the Ideas 
is itself not ideal, but exalted above ideality (Znnead. V. 5, 6; VI. 7. 32: ἀρχὴ δὲ τὸ 
aveideov, ov τὸ μορφῆς δεόμενον, ἀλλ᾽ ag’ ov πασα μορφὴ voepa); by the ovcia, Being, to 
which Plato conceives the Good as superior, Plotinus understands not the Idea of Being, 
but the sum of all Ideas. These dogmas, continues Plotinus, were touched upon already 
before the time of Plato by Parmenides, who rightly identified the existent and the Nous, 
and separated them from the Sensible; but when he proceeded to see in this unity of being 
and thought the highest of all unities, he proceeded inexactly and laid himself open to 
criticism, which must still recognize in this pretended unity a real plurality. But the 
Parmenides of the Platonic Dialogue, says Plotinus, discriminates more exactly (Hn- 
mead. V. 1. 8). Nor did Anaxagoras, who posited the Nous as first and simplest, with his 
antique manner hit upon the precise truth. The same may be said of Aristotle, for whom, 
lik_wise, the Nous was first in rank. Plotinus seeks, nevertheless, to show that his own 
doctrine is the inevitable consequence of certain Aristotelian teachings. In Heraclitus and 
Empedocles he discovers at least a separation of the intelligible from the sensible; but of 
all the philosophers before Plato, he finds the Pythagoreans and Pherecydes most friendly 
to his conceptions (Ennead. V. 1.9). The Pythagoreans saw that the One, as exalted above 
all contrariety, admitted only of negative determinations, and that even unity could be 
ascribed to it only in the sense of the negation of plurality, for which reason they give it the 
symbolical name of Apollo (Ennead. V. 6.4). Plotinus considers himself, therefore, justified 
in drawing the general conclusion that his doctrine, so far from being new, was known even 
to the earliest philosophers, though insufficiently developed by them, and in the develop- 
ment supplied by himself he pretends to furnish merely an exegesis of what these, his pre- 
decessors, had already taught (τοὺς viv λόγους ἐξηγητὰς ἐκείνων γεγονέναι, Ennead. V. 1. 8). 

In what manner the Many, or plurality, was evolved from the One is a problem on 
whose solution Plotinus does not venture without a preliminary prayer to the Deity for 
the gift of correct discernment (Hnnead. V.1. 6). He rejects the attempted pantheistic 
solution, according to which the One is at the same time All; the One, he says, is not all 
things, but before all (Hnnead. III. 8. 8). The One is at once nothing and all things; the 
former, since all things are posterior to the One, the latter, inasmuch as all are derived 
from it (Hnnead. VII. 7. 32). It is not by division that all things are derived from it, since 
then it would cease to be One (£nnead. III. 8. 9). Remaining itself in repose, its products 
arise from it as if by radiation (περιλαμψις), just as the sun emits from itself the bright- 
ness which surrounds it (Hnnead. V. 1.9). But many difficulties remain in the way of 
this hypothesis, which Plotinus will not conceal. Was the plurality, which the One has 
discharged from itself, originally contained in the One or not? If the affirmative be true, 
then the One was not strictly one; if the negative, how could the One give that which it 
did not possess? The solution of this difficulty is found in the transcending power of the 
One, which latter, as the superior, can send forth from the superabundance of its perfec- 
tion the inferior, without having contained the latter, as such, in itself (Hnnead. V. 2. 1: 
ov yap τέλειον οἷον ὑπερεῤῥυη, καὶ τὸ ὑπερπλῆρες οὐτου πεποίηκν ἀλλο). More especially, 
the possibility of the genesis of all things from the One is grounded in the circumstance 
that the One is both everywhere and yet in no place. If it were simply everywhere, it 
would be all things and so not one; but since it is also nowhere, it follows that while 
all things exist through the One, in virtue of its being everywhere, they exist as differen- 
tiated from the One, in virtue of its being nowhere (Hnnead, III. 9. 3). 


248 PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 


The immediate product of the One is the Nous (Ennead. V. 1.6 and 1.) The latter is 
an image (εἰκών) of the former. As the product of the One, the image turns toward the 
One in order to grasp and comprehend it, and through this very turning (ἐπεστροφῆ) it be- 
comes Nous (reason), for all theoretical comprehension is either αἴσθησις or νοῦς (sense-per- 
ception or rational apprehension); it is the former only when the object of comprehension 
is sensible, hence when this object is supra-sensible it is νοῦς. The Nous is in distinction 
from the One subject to differentiation (ἑτερότης), in that the duality of knowing and known 
is inherent in it; for even when both these terms are, in fact, identical (in self-knowledge), 
the ideal difference remains. The Nous includes in itself the world of Ideas (Hnnead. III. 9; 
V.5). The Ideas have their material constitution, but it is a supra-sensible nature (En- 
nead. IV. 4.4: εἰ δὲ μορφῆ, ἔστι καὶ τὸ μορφούμενον, περὶ ὃ ἡ διαφορά, ἔστιν Gpa Kai ὕλῃ ἡ 
τὴν μορφὴν δεχομένη καὶ ἀει τὸ ὑποκείμενον " ἔτι εἰ κόσμος νοητός ἔστιν ἐκεῖ, μίμημα δὲ οὗτος 
ἐκείνου, οὗτος δὲ σύνθετος καὶ ἐξ ὑλης, κἀκεῖ δεῖ ὕλην εἷναι). That the Ideas are immanent 
in the Nous and do not exist externally to it (ὅτε οὐκ ἔξω τοῦ νοῦ τὰ νοητά) is the second 
cardinal point of the Plotinic doctrine. Plotinus cites Plato’s utterance in the Timaeus, 
that the Nous looks at the Ideas, which are in “the Living” (ἐν τῷ 6 ἐστι ζῶον), and says 
that from this it might appear that the Ideas were prior to the Nous; but if that were 
so, the Nous would only possess in itself representations of the truly existent, and 
not the latter itself, hence not the truth, which would then lie beyond its sphere. Plato 
can only have intended, therefore, to assert the identity of the Nous with that intellectual 
world in which exist the Ideas (the κόσμος νοητὸς or the 6 ἔστι ζῶον). The intelligible 
(νοητόν) 18 not substantially, but only ideally, distinguishable from the Nous; the same 
existence is intelligible, in so far as it possesses the attributes of repose and unity (στάσις͵ 
ἑἐνότης, ἡσυχία), and Nous, in so far as it exercises the act of knowing (Hnmnead. 111. 9. 1). 
The Nous, ὦ. e., the divine and true Nous, cannot err; if it had not the truth in itself, but 
only images of the truth, it would err (τὰ ψευδῆ ἕξει καὶ οὐδὲν ἀληθές), it would not par- 
ticipate in the truth (ἄμοιρος ἀληθείας), and would yet be subject to the false belief that it 
possessed the truth; it would then not be Nous at all, and no place whatsoever would 
remain for the truth. It is, therefore, incorrect to seek for the Ideas (ta νοητά) outside of 
the Nous (as did Longinus), or to suppose that the Nous contains only images or impres- 
sions (τύποι) of that which exists; on the contrary, one must confess that in the true Nous 
the Ideas are immanent (Fmnead. V. 1. 1 and 2).* 

The Soul is the image (eidwAov) and product of the Nous, just as the Nous is of the 
One (Ennead. V 1.7 ψυχὴν γεννᾶ νοῦς) As being only the image of the Nous, the soul 
is necessarily of inferior rank and character, though none the less really divine and en- 
dowed with generative force. The soul turns in a double direction toward the Nous, its 
producer, and toward the material, which is its own product. Coming forth from the 
Nous, the soul extends itself, as it were, into the corporeal, just as the point, extended, 
becomes a line; there is, therefore, in the soul (and this is in accordance with Plato's 
teaching in the~7imaeus) an ideal, indivisible element, and a divisible element which goes 
to produce the material world. The soul is an immaterial substance, not a body, nor the 


* Neither the doctrine of Longinus nor that of Plotinus is identical with Plato's doctrine: Pluto repre 
sents the Nous of the world-artist as immanent in the idea of the Good, and in the dialogue Soph. (p. 248)— 
where what was probably in the beginning a poetic personification has already become a matter of doctrine— 
motion. life, animation, and reason are ascribed to the Ideas, so that their relation to the Nous is neither 
that of immanence nor that of transcendence, but the Nous is immanent in them. That the Ideas transcend 
the hwman Nous is justly recognized as Plato’s doctrine both by Plotinus and Longinus. It followed ob- 
viously from the argument of Plotinns, that he must either refuse to man a knowledge of the Ideas or 
elee make them also immanent in the human Nous, 





PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 249 


harmony, nor the entelechy of the body and inseparable from the latter, since not only the 
Nous, but also memory, and even the faculty of perception and the psychical force, which 
molds the body, are separable from the body (Plotin., ap. Euseb., Praepar. Ev., XV. 10). 
There exists a real plurality of souls; the highest of all is the soul of the world; but the 
rest are not mere parts of the world-soul (Hnnead. IV. 3.7; IV. 9). The soul permeates 
the body as fire permeates air. It is more correct to say that the body is in the soul than 
that the soul is in the body; there is, therefore, a portion of the soul in which there is no 
body, a portion to whose functions the co-operation of the body is unnecessary. But nei- 
ther are the sensuous faculties lodged in the body, whether in its individual parts or in 
the body as a whole; they are only present with the body (παρεῖναι, παρουσία), the soul 
lending to each bodily organ the force necessary for the execution of its functions (Ennead. 
IV. 3. 22 and 23). Thus the soul is present not only in the individual parts of the body, 
but in the whole body, and present everywhere in its entirety, not divided among the dif- 
ferent parts of the body; it is entirely in the whole body, and entirely in every part. The 
soul is divided, because it is in all the parts of its body, and it is undivided, because it is 
entirely in all parts and in every part (μεριστή, ὅτι ἐν πᾶσι μέρεσι τοῦ ἐν ᾧ ἐστιν, ἀμέριστος 
δέ͵ ὅτι ὃλη ἐν πᾶσι καὶ ἐν ὁτῳοῦν αὐτοῦ ὅλη, Ennead. IV. 2.1). The soul is per se indivi- 
sible, being divided only as related to the bodies into which it enters, since these could not 
Teceive it if it remained undivided (dbid.). (It is obvious that Plotinus sought by this 
qualification to escape the objection of Severus to the Platonic doctrine of the mixed 
nature of the substance of the soul.) The soul is essentially in the Nous, as the Nous 
is in the One; but the soul contains the body (Hnnead. V. 5. 9). The Divine extends from 
the One to the soul (Hnnead. V. 1. 7). 

The soul, in virtue of its mobility, begets the corporeal (Znnead. ITI. 7. 10; ef. IV. 3. 93 
I. 8.5). That material bodies possess a substratum (ὑποκείμενον), which, itself unchanged, is 
the subject of manifold changing forms, is inferable (as Plato teaches) from the transition 
of various kinds of matter into each other, whereby it is made obvious that there are no 
determinate forms of matter which are original and unchangeable, such as, for example, 
the four elements of Empedocles, but that all determination arises from the union of form 
(μορφῇ) and unqualified matter (ὕλη). Matter, in the most general sense of the word, 
is the basis or ‘‘depth” of each thing (τὸ βάθος ἑκάστου ἡ ὕλη). Matter is darkness, as 
the Logos is light. It has no real being (it is μὴ ὄν). It is the qualitatively indeterminate 
(ἄπειρον), which is rendered determinate by the accession of form; as deprived of form 
it is evil (κακόν), as capable of receiving forms, it is of an intermediate nature between 
good and bad (μέσον ἀγαθοῦ καὶ κακοῦ). But the matter in the ideas is only in so far simi- 
lar to that which is in sensible objects, as both fall under the general designation of “the 
dark depth;” in other respects, the difference between these two kinds of matter is as 
great as that which exists between ideal and sensible form (διάφορόν ye μὴν τὸ σκοτεινὸν 
τό τε ἐν τοῖς νοητοῖς τό τε ἐν τοῖς αἰσθητοῖς ὑπάρχον, διάφορός Te ἡ ὕλη, ὅσον καὶ τὸ εἶδος 
τὸ ἐπικείμενον ἀμφοῖν διάφορον); as that form (μορφή) which is perceived by the senses is 
only an image (εἴδωλον) of ideal form, so also the substratum of the sensible world is only 
an image or shadow of the ideal substratum; this latter has, like the ideal form, a true 
existence, and is rightly called οὐσία, substance, while the designation of the substratum 
of sensible things as substance is incorrect (Hnnead. IT. 4). 

Plotinus subjects the Aristotelian and also the Stoic doctrine of categories to a minute 
criticism, of which the fundamental idea is that the ideal and the sensible do not fall 
under the same categories. He then offers, himself, a new doctrine of categories. In 
agreement with the (Platonic?) Dialogue Sophistes (p. 257 seq.), he designates as funda- 
mental forms of the ideal: being, rest, motion, identity, and difference (ὄν, στάσις, κίνησις, 


250 PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 


ταὐτότης, and ἑτερότης). The categories which apply to the sensible world, taken in the 
sense here given to them, are not the same with those of the ideal world, yet they are 
not entirely different; they are homonymous with the latter, but are to be understood 
only in an analogous sense (dé . . . ταὐτὰ ἀναλογίᾳ καὶ ὁμωνυμίᾳ λαμβάνειν). Plotinus 
seeks to reduce the Aristotelian categories to these analoga of the ideal categories 
(Ennead. VI. 1-3). 

The essence of beauty consists not in mere symmetry, but in the supremacy of the 
higher over the lower, of the form over matter, of the soul over the body, of reason and 
goodness over the soul. Artistic representation imitates not merely sensible objects, but, 
in its highest development, the ideas themselves, of which sensible objects are images. 

In consequence of their descent into corporeality, the souls of men have forgotten their 
divine origin and become unmindful of the Heavenly Father. They wished to be inde- 
pendent, rejoiced in their self-lordship (τῷ αὐτεξουσίῳ), and fell constantly farther and 
farther from God, forgetting their own dignity, and paying honor to that which was 
most contemptible. Hence the peed of man’s conversion to that which is the more 
excellent (Ennead. V. 1. 1). Man has not lost his freedom; the essence of freedom—says 
Plotinus, in agreement with Aristotle—is the absence of constraint, combined with knowl- 
edge (μὴ Bia μετὰ τοῦ εἰδέναι, Ennead. VI. 8.1). Some men remain buried in the sen- 
suous, holding pleasure to be the only good and pain the only evil; they seek to attain 
the former and to avoid the latter, and this they regard as their wisdom. Others, who 
are capable of rising to a certain point, but are yet unable to discern that which is 
above them, become only virtuous, and devote themselves to practical life, aiming merely 
to make a right choice from among those things, which are after all only of an inferior 
nature. But there is a third class of men of divine nature, who, gifted with higher 
power and keener vision, turn toward the radiance which shines from above and rise 
into its presence; they rise above the region of obscuring mists and, despising all that 
is of the earth, sojourn there, where is their true fatherland and where they become 
partakers of true joy (Ennead. V. 9.1). Virtue is defined by Plotinus, with Plato, as 
resemblance to God (θεῷ ὁμοιοθῆναι, Ennead. I. 2. 1), and sometimes, also, as activity 
conformed to the nature of the agent (ἐνεργεῖν κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν), or obedience to reason 
(ἐπαΐειν λόγου), definitions which recall the doctrines of Aristotle and the Stoics. Plotinus 
distinguishes between civil and purifying virtues and virtues which render their possessor 
like God. The civil virtues (πολιτικαὶ ἀρεταί) are practical wisdom, courage, temperance, 
and justice, the latter in the sense of ‘‘attention to one’s own business, whether as a ruler 
or a subject” (οἰκειοπραγία ἀρχῆς περὶ καὶ τοῦ ἄρχεσθαι); the purifying virtues (καθάρσεις) 
deliver man from all sin (ἁμαρτία), by making him to flee from whatever pertains merely to 
sense, while the third class of virtues end, not in deliverance from sin, but in identification 
with God (οὐκ ἔξω ἁμαρτίας εἷναι, ἀλλὰ ϑεὸν εἰναι). In the virtues of the last class those 
of the first are repeated in a higher sense (ἡ δικαιοσύνη ἡ μείζων τὸ πρὸς νοῦν ἐνεργεῖν, τὸ 
δὲ σωφρονεῖν ἡ εἴσω πρὸς νοῦν στροφή, ἡ δὲ ἀνδρεία ἀπάθεια καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν τοῦ πρὸς ὃ 
βλέπει, ἀπαθὲς ὃν τὴν φύσιν, . . πρὸς νοῦν ἡ ὅρασις σοφία καὶ φρόνησις, Ennead. I. 2). 

The last and highest end for man is ecstatic elevation to the one truly Good. This 
elevation is not effectuated by thought, but by a higher faculty; the intellectual cognition 
of the Ideas forms to it only a stepping-stone, which must be passed and left behind. The 
highest point which can be reached or aspired to is the knowledge of, or rather contact 
with, the Good itself (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ site γνῶσις εἴτε ἐπαφῇ); for the sake of this the sout 
despises even thought itself, which she yet prefers to all things except this; thought is a 
form of motion (κίνησις), but the soul desires to be unmoved, like the One itself (Hnnead. 
VI. 7. 25 and 26). The soul resembles God by its unity (Hnnead. 111. 8. 9) and by its pos: 





PLOTINUS, AMELIUS, AND PORPHYRY. 251 


session of a centre (τὸ ψυχῆς οἷον Kévtpov, Ennead. VI. 9. 8), and hence arises the possi- 
bility of its communion with the One (Ennead. VI. 9.10). When we look upon God we 
have reached our end and found rest, all disharmony is removed, we circle around God ip 
the movements of a divinely-inspired dance (χορεία ἔνθεος), and behold in him the source 
of life, the source of the Nous, the principle of being, the cause of all good, the source and 
principle of the soul, and we enjoy the most perfect blessedness (Hnnead. VI. 9. 8 and 9). 
Yet this is not a beholding (θέαμα), but another manner of knowing; it is ecstasy, simpli 
fication, contact with Good (ἔκστασις, ἁπλωσις, ἁφή, Ennead. VI. 9.11). Not always are we 
able to abide in this blessed state; not yet completely loosed from the bonds of the earthly, 
it is only too easy for the earthly to win back our regards, and only rarely does the direct 
vision of the supreme God fall to the lot of the best of men, the virtuous and wise, the 
god-like and blessed (Hnnead. VI. 9. 10 and 11). 

According to the testimony of Porphyry, his disciple, Plotinus attained to this unifica- 
tion with God only four times in the six years which Porphyry spent with him (Porphyr., 
Vit. Plot., c. 23). 

One of the earliest disciples of Plotinus at Rome (246 seq.) was Amelius (Gentilianus, 
the Tuscan, from Ameria), who at the same time allowed also great authority to Nume- 
nius. He distinguished in the Nous three hypostases, which he styled three Demiurges 
or three kings: τὸν ὄντα, τὸν ἔχοντα, τὸν ὁρῶντα. Of these the second participated in the 
real being of the first, and the third in the being of the second, enjoying at the same 
time the vision of the first (Procl., in Plat. Tim., 93d). Amelius maintained the theory 
(opposed by Plotinus) of the unity of all souls in the world-soul (Jamblich., ap Stob., 
Ecl., 1. 886; 888; 898). 

The most important of the disciples of Plotinus was Porphyry. Born at Batanea, in 
Syria, or perhaps at Tyre, in the year 232 or 233 a. D., he received his education at Tyre. 
His original name was Malchus, which Longinus, whose pupil he was for a time (252-262), 
is said to have translated into Porphyrius (Eunap., Vit. Soph., p. 1, Boiss.). At Rome, in 
the year 262, he became a pupil and follower of Plotinus, and here, after having passed 
the years 267-270 in Sicily, he is said to have lived and died (about 304 a. p.). Porphyry 
lays claim less to the rank of an originator in philosophy than to that of an expositor and 
defender of the doctrine of Plotinus, which he regards as identical with that of Plato and 
substantially also with that of Aristotle. Porphyry wrote a work in seven books, entitled 
περὶ Tov μίαν εἶναι τὴν Πλάτωνος καὶ ᾿Αριστοτέλους αἵρεσιν (according to Suidas, 8. v. Πορφύριος), 
and also expositions of Plato's Timaeus and Sophistes and of Aristotle’s Categoriae and De 
Interpr etatione, and the still extant Eioaywy7 εἰς τὰς ( Αριστοτέλους) κατηγορίας (περὶ γένους Kai 
εἴδους καὶ διαφορᾶς καὶ ἰδίου Kai συμβεβηκότος), which is usually printed in the beginning of 
the Organon. An epitome, by Porphyry, of the Plotinic system, expressed in a series of 
aphorisms, is likewise now extant. Besides these, Porphyry wrote a number of original 
works. Eunapius (Vita Porphyr., p. 8, Boiss.) ascribes to Porphyry, as his principal 
merit, that by his perspicuous and pleasing diction he brought within the range of the 
understanding of all men the doctrine of Plotinus, which in the language of its author 
had seemed difficult and obscure. The doctrine of Porphyry is, however, distinguished 
from that of Plotinus by its more practical and religious character; the end of philoso- 
phizing, according to Porphyry, is the salvation of the soul (ἡ τῆς ψυχῆς σωτηρία, 
Porphyr., ap. Euseb., Pr. Hv., IV. 7, et al.). The cause of evil is to be found in the soul, 
in its desires after the low and base, and not in the body as such (Ad Marcellam, ο. 29). 
The means of deliverance from evil are self-purification (κάθαρσις) through asceticism and 
the philosophical cognition of God. To divination and theurgical initiations Porphyry con- 
cedes only a subordinate significance; in his later years, especially, he was instant in 


252 JAMBLICHUS AND THE SYRIAN SCHOOL. 


warning his followers against their misuse (see, in particular, his epistle to Anebo, the 
Egyptian Priest). Porphyry recommends abstinence from animal food on religious 
grounds (see Bernays, Theophr. Schr. tiber Frémmigkeit, mit kr. wu. erkl. Bem. zu Porph. Schr. 
iiber Enthalt., pp. 4-35). Porphyry appears to have taught (in Ins six books περὶ ὑλης) 
more distinctly than Plotinus the doctrine of the emanation of matter from the super- 
sensuous (and proximately from the Soul; Procl., in Tim., 109, 133, 139; Simplic., in Phys., 
f. 50b). The doctrine that the world is without beginning in time was defended by Por- 
phyry against the objections of Atticus and Plutarch (Procl., ἐπὶ Tim., 119). During his 
residence in Sicily, Porphyry wrote a work κατὰ χριστιανῶν, distributed into fifteen Books, 
in which he attacked the doctrines of the Christians, and especially the doctrine of the 
divinity of Jesus. This work is often mentioned by the Church Fathers (Euseb., Hist. 
Eccles. VI. 19; Demonstr. Evang., 111. 6; Augustin., Civ. Det, XIX. 23 et al.). In the 
twelfth book Porphyry declared the prophecies in the Book of Daniel (which appears to 
have been composed about 164 or 163 B.C.) to be prophecies after the event (vaticinia ex 
eventu). Methodius, Eusebius of Ceesarea, Apollinarius, and Philostorgius wrote works in 
reply to Porphyry’s. But neither these works, nor the work of Porphyry (which was 
burned by order of the Emperor Theodosius II., in the year 435) have come down to us. 
Cf. J. Bernays, Theophr., etc., p. 133 seq. 


§ 69. Jamblichus (died about 330 a. p.), a native of Chalcis in 
Ceele-Syria and pupil of Porphyry, employed the Neo-Platonie phi- 
losophy simply as a means for confirming the polytheistic cultus. He 
attempted the speculative justification of superstition. He imitated 
Pythagoras more than Plato, his philosophy resting rather on mystical 
speculations with numbers, than on Platonic ideas. In his system 
not only did all the gods of the Greeks and Orientals (excepting the 
Christian God) and the gods of Plotinus find a place, but he also took 
a quite peculiar pleasure in adding to the number of superior divini- 
ties from the resources of his own fancy. 

For the disciples of Jamblichus, chief among whom were Avdesius, 
Chrysanthius, Maximus, Priscus, Eusebius, Sopater, Sallustins, and 
Julian the Apostate (who was Emperor from December, 361, to June, 
363), and others, the practice of theurgy had in general more interest 
than philosophical speculation. Theodorus of Asine, one of the ear- 
hiest of the disciples of Jamblichus, is the only one who labored for 
further development of the system. The immoderate and even deify- 
ing veneration of the heads of schools, and especially of Jamblichus, 
increased in proportion as the philosophic achievements of their dis- 
ciples became more insignificant. Those in this period who did most 
for philosophy were the commentators of the works of the ancient 
philosophers, Themistius being the most noteworthy among them. 

Jamblichi Chaleidensis de Vita Pythagorica Liber, ed. Theoph. Kiessling; accedunt Porphyr. δ᾽6 


vita Pythag., ete., Leips. 1815-16. Jambl. de Pythagorica Vita, ed. Ant. Westermann, Paris, 1850, in 
Cobet’s edition of Diogenes Laértius. Jambi. Adhortatio ad Philosophiam, ed. Kiessling, Leips. 1818. 





πον 


ΚΝ 


JAMBLICHUS AND THE SYRIAN SCHOOL, 253 


Jambl. περὶ τῆς κοινῆς μαθηματικῆς ἐπιστημῆς λόγος τρίτος (in Villoison’s Anecd. Graec., I1., pp. 188 seq., 
Venice. 1781). Jambi. Theologumena Arithmeticae ; accedunt Nicomachi Geraseni Arithmeticae Libri 
41. ed. F. Ast, Leips. 1817. (Jamblichi?) de Mysteriis liber, ed. Gust. Parthey, Berlin, 1857. 6. E. Heben- 
streit (in De Jamblichi, philosophi Syri, doctrina Christianae religioni, quam imitari studet, novia, 
Leips. 1764) treats of the doctrine of Jamblichus. Of the author of the De Mysteriis Aigyptiorum treat 
Meiners (in the Comment. Soc. Gotting., IV. p. 50 seq., 1782), Harless (Das Buch von den tigyptischen 
Mysterien, Munich, 1858), and Heinr. Kellner (Analyse der Schrift des Jamblichus De Mysteriis, als eines 
Versuches, eine wiss. Theologie des Heidenthums herzustellen, in the Theol. Quartalschr., 1867, No. 3, 
pp. 359-396). 

Drewippi in Arist. categorias dubitationes et solutiones primum, ed. Spengel, Munich, 1859. 

Μαξίμον φιλοσόφου περὶ καταρχῶν,. ed. Gerhardius, Leips. 1820. 

Juliani Imp. Opera, ed. Petrus Petavius and Car. Cantoclarus, Paris, 1588 (ed Dion. Petavius), Paris, 
1630; ed. Spanheim, Leips. 1696. Libanius, ἐπιτάφιος ἐπ᾽ ᾿Ιουλιανῷ, in Lib. Op., ed. Reiske, Altenburg, 
1791-97. Zpistolae, ed. L. H. Heyler, Mayence, 1828. Of modern writers on Julian may be mentioned 
Gibbon (chaps. XXII.-XXIV. of his History), Aug. Neander (Ueber den Kuiser Julian und sein Zeitaiter, 
Leipsic, 1812), G. F. Wiggers (De Jul. Apost., Dias., Rostock, 1810, and in Illgen’s Zeitschr. f. hist. Theol., 
Leips. 1837), H. Schulze (Progr., Strals. 1859), Teuffel (Déss., ΤΏΡ. 1844), D. F. Strauss (Jul. der Abtriin- 
nige, der Romantiker auf dem Thron der Casaren, Mannheim, 1847), Auer (Kaiser Julian der Abtr., 
Vienna, 1855), Wilh. Mangold (Jul. der Abtr., Vortrag, gehalten in Marburg, Stuttg. 1862), Carl Semisch 
(Jul. der Abtr., ein Charakterbild, Breslau, 1862), Fr. Liibker (K. Julians Kampf und Ende, Hamburg, 
1864), Eugéne Talbot (Julien, wwvres completes, traduction nowvelle accompagnée de sommaires, notes, 
éclaircissements, etc., Paris, 1863), Baur (Die christl. Kirche vom 4.—6. Jahrh., pp. 17-43), and Philip 
Schaff (History of the Ancient Church, New York, 1859-67, German edition, Leipsic, 1867, §§ 186 and 141, 
and in the Zeitschr. 7. hist. Th., h. v. Kahnis, 1867, pp. 408-444. 

Sallustii philosophi de diis et mundo lib. ed. Leo Alatius, Rome, 1638: ed. J. C. Orelli, Zurich, 1821, 

Themistii opera omnia ; paraphrases in Aristot. et orationes, cum Alerandri Aphrodisiensis libris 
de anima et de fato ed. Vict. Trincavellus, Venice, 1534. Them. paraphrases Arist. librorum, quae 
supersunt ed. Leon. Spengel, Leipsic, 1866. Cf. Valentin Rose, on a supposed paraphrase by Themistius 
(ot the Prior Analytics) in the Hermes (Review), Vol. 11. 1867, No. 8, pp. 859-396 (Rose ascribes this 
paraphrase conjecturally to Sophonias, a monk of the fourteenth century). 

On Hypatia, cf. Jo. Chph. Wolff (in Fragmenta et elogia mulierum Graecarum, quae orat. prosa 
usae sunt, Gott. 1739), Jo. Ch. Wernsdorf (Wittemberg, 1747-8), Rich. Hoche (Hypatia, die Tochter Theons, 
in the Philol. XV., 1860, pp. 485-474). 


Jamblichus heard first the Neo-Platonist Anatolius, a disciple of Porphyry, and after- 
ward Porphyry himself (Eunap., Vit. Jambl., p. 11, Boiss.). He died in the reign of Con- 
stantine, and was not living when the latter caused Sopater, one of his disciples, to 
be executed (Eunap., Vit. desi, p. 20). Some even of the immediate disciples of Jam- 
blichus believed in the miraculous acts attributed to this philosopher, who was called by 
his reverers ‘the divine” (very often in Proclus), or, sometimes, “ most divine” (Julian, 
Epist., 27). Besides his commentaries cn Plato and Aristotle, and his XaAdaixy τελειοτάτη 
θεολογία (the 28th book of which is cited by Damasc., De Princ., ch. 43 init.), he composed, 
among other things, the following works, still extant: περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, λόγος 
προτρεπτικὸς εἰς φιλοσοφίαν, περὶ κοινῆς μαθηματικῆς ἐπιστήμης, περὶ τῆς Νικομάχου apib- 
μητικῆς εἰσαγωγῆς and the Θεολογούμενα τῆς ἀριθμητικῆς. Whether the work De Mysteriis 
Aigyptiorum is from the pen of Jamblichus is doubtful; Proclus is reported to have 
ascribed it to him; at all events, it was composed either by Jamblichus or by one of his 
disciples. The pretended Epistles of Julian to Jamblichus, still extant, are supposititious ; 
the hypothesis (of Brucker and others), that the Emperor addressed them to the nephew 
of the head of the school, who bore the same name, is not in harmony with the character 
of these letters. 

Above the One of Plotinus, Jamblichus assumes still another absolutely first One, 
superior to all contraries and, as being wholly without attributes, elevated even above the 
Good. Under and next to this utterly ineffable first essence (ἡ πάντῃ ἄῤῥητος ἀρχή, accord- 
ing to Damasc., De Princ., ch. 43 init.) stands that One, which (as Plotinus had taught) is 


254 JAMBLICHUS AND THE SYRIAN SCHOOL. 


identical with the Good. Its product is the intelligible world (κόσμος νοητός), from which 
the intellectual world (κόσμος νοερός) is an emanation. The intelligible world includes the 
objects of thought (the ideas), while the intellectual world includes all thinking beings. 
The elements of the intelligible world are “limit” or ‘‘subsistence” (πέρας or ὕπαρξις, 
termed also “father,” zarqp), ‘‘illimitation” or ‘possibility of subsistence” (ἄπειρον or 
δύναμις τῆς ὑπάρξεως), and the union of these two or the realization of the given “ possi- 
bility ” (μικτόν or ἐνέργεια or νόησις τῆς δυνάμεως). The members of the intellectual world 
are likewise three in number; they are Nous, Power (δύναμες), and the Demiurge, which, 
however, Jamblichus seems to have subdivided into seven. Then follows the psychical 
sphere, containing again three parts: the supra-mundane Soul and two other souls, which, 
according to Jamblichus (ap. Procl., in Tim., 214 seq.), emanated from the first. Within 
the world exist the souls of the gods of the popular polytheistie religion, and of angels, 
demons, and heroes in multitudes, whose numbers Jamblichus (Pythagorizing) determines 
according to a numerical schema and whom he ranks in a fantastical order. The last place 
in the order of existence is filled by the sensible world. 

The work De Mystertis Avgyptiorum ( Αβάμμωνος διδασκάλου πρὸς τὴν Πορφυρίου πρὸς 
᾿Ανεβὼ ἐπιστολὴν ἀπόκρισις καὶ τῶν ἐν αὐτῇ ἀπορημάτων λύσεις) claims supra-rationality 
not only (as was done by Plotinus) for the supreme, supra-existential essence, but for all 
the gods, on the ground that the principle of contradiction does not apply to them (I. 3 
et al.); this speculative doctrine is then employed in justification of the crudest absurdities, 
with no lack in any instance of apparently rational grounds. 

One of the immediate disciples of Jambhichus was Theodorus of Asine, who is said also 
to have listened to the instructions of Porphyry. He drew up a triadic system still more 
complicated than the system of Jamblichus, thus assisting the transition to the doctrine 
of Proclus. He posits (with Plotinus and Porphyry) only a single first being, net (with 
Jamblichus) a first and a second, as being above the sphere of the intelligible, but desig- 
nates it (with Jamblichus) as the Ineffable and as the cause of good. Between the first 
being and the psychical realm he places a trinity of essences, the intelligible, the intellec- 
tual, and the demiurgic. 

Other disciples of Jamblichus were Sopater of Apamea, who was suspected by Con- 
stantine the Great of having deprived a fleet laden with grain of favorable winds by 
magical agencies, and was consequently put to death, Dexippus, Aidesius of Cappadocia, 
the anonymous author of a compendium of the Neo-Platonic philosophy, and Eustachius 
of Cappadocia. Atdesius was the successor of Jamblichus and teacher of Chrysanthius of 
Sardis (who instructed Eunapius), and of Maximus of Ephesus, Priscus of Molossi, and 
Eusebius of Myndus, by whom Julian was instructed. With Julian agreed in philosophy 
Sallustius, one of his youthful friends. Scientific demonstration was a matter of small 
consequence with the most of these men; the practice of theurgical arts was better suited 
for their lofty intellects. The attempt to foment a reaction against Christianity absorbed 
the best forces of the school. 

In the course of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century lived and taught Themis- 
tius (born about 317, died after 387; he was the son of Eugenius of Paphlagonia, was 
educated at Constantinople, became a Peripatetic and Eclectic Platonist, gained repute as a 
commentator of Aristotle and Plato, and was honored by his contemporaries, on account 
of his excellent style, with the surname ὁ Εὐφραδής; his paraphrase of the Posterior Ana- 
lytics, Physics, and Psychology of Aristotle is still extant), Aurelius Macrobius, the author 
of the Saturnalia, and, at Alexandria, the elder Olympiodorus, and the female philosopher 
Hypatia, who was murdered by the Christians in the month of March, 415, a martyr to 
polytheism. Marcianus Capella (see above, § 65) lived probably about 430 a. p. 


THE ATHENIAN SCHOOL, AND NEO-PLATONIC COMMENTATORS, 200 


§ 70. After the failure of the practical contest waged against 
Christianity and in behaif of the renovation of the ancient cultus 
and the ancient faith, the representatives of Neo-Platonism applied 
themselves with new zeal to scientific labors, and especially to the 
study and exegesis of the works of Plato and Aristotle. To the 
Athenian School belong Plutarch, the son of Nestorius (died about 
433 a. p.), Syrianus, his pupil, who wrote commentaries on works of 
Plato and Aristotle, Hierocles the Alexandrian, and Proclus (411- 
485), the pupil of (the elder) Olympiodorus and of Plutarch and 
Syrianus. Proclus is the most important of the later Neo-Platonists, 
“the Scholastic among the Greek philosophers.” He collated, ar- 
ranged, and dialectically elaborated the whole body of transmitted 
philosophy, augmented it by additions of his own, and combined the 
whole in a sort of system, to which he succeeded in giving the appear- 
ance of a rigidly scientific form. Other adherents of the same school 
were Marinus, Proclus’ pupil and successor, Asclepiodotus, a fellow- 
pupil of the latter, Ammonius, the son of Hermias, Zenodotus, Isi- 
dorus, the successor of Marinus, and his successor, Hegias, all imme- 
diate pupils of Proclus ; also Damascius, who was the president of the 
school at Athens from about 520 a. p., until the closing of the same 
in 529 by an edict of the Emperor Justinian, interdicting the giving 
of instruction in philosophy at Athens. Hellenic philosophy sue- 
cumbed, partly to the intrinsic weakness into which its own vagaries 
had led it, and partly to the pressure of Christianity. Still, both at 
and after the time of this event service was rendered to philosophy 
through the composition of commentaries on the works of Aristotle 
and Plato, in which the latter were transmitted to later generations. 
Among those who distinguished themselves in this connection may 
be mentioned, especially, Simplicius and (the younger) Olympiodorus, 
as also Boéthius and Philoponus the Christian. 

Syriani Comment. in libros ITI., XIII, XTV., metaphys. Aristot. lat. interpret. H. Bagolino, Venice, 
1558. On Syrianus ef. Bach, De Sy: iano philosopho neo-platonico, Part I., G.-Pr.. Lauban, 1862. 

Hieroclis Alecandrini Commentar.in Aur, Carm. Pyth, ed. Jo. Curterius, Paris, 1583; De Providentia 
el Fato, ed. Ἐς. Morellius, Paris, 1597; Quae supersunt, ed. Pearson, London, 1655 and 1673; Comm. in Aur. 
Carm. Pyth, ed. Thom. Gaisford, in his edition of Stobeus, Oxford, 1850; ed. Mullach, Berlin, 1853. 

Procli in Plat. Tim. Comm. et in libros De Rep., Basel, 1534, (Published as a supplement to the 
Basel edition of the Works of Plato. The Commentary on the ep. isincomplete. Respecting certain later, 
partially complementary, publications, see Bernays, in the appendix to his work, entitled “Arist. ἐλ 67" 
Wirkung der Tragédie,’ No. 18, ad p. 163.) Procliin Theologiam Platonis libri sex una cum Marini 
vita Procli et Procli Instit. Theolog.. ed. Aemil. Portus et Fr. Lindenbrog, Hamburg, 1618; Excerpta ex 
Procli scholiis in Plat. Cratylum, ed. J. F Boissonade, Leipsic, 1820; Jz Plat. Αἰοῖν. Comm. ed. Fr. 


Creuzer, Frankfort, 1820-25; Procli Opera, ed. Victor Cousin, Paris, 1820-25; Procli Comm. in Plat. 
Parm., ed. G. 8tallbaum, in bis edition of the Parm., Leipsic, 1839, and separately, Leipsic, 1840; Jn Plat. 


256 THE ATHENIAN SCHOOL, AND NEO-PLATONIC COMMENTATORS. 


Timaeum, ed. C. E. Chr. Schneider, Breslau, 1847; Procli philos, Platonicit opera inedita, quae primus 
olim ὁ codicibus mser. Parisinis Italicisque vulgaverat, nunc secundis curis emend. et auxit Victor 
Cousin, Paris, 1864. The Medicean Codex of the works of Proclus on the Rep. of Plato is incomplete, but 
contains an index of the complete Commentary; cf. Val. Rose, in the Hermes II. 1867, pp. 96-101. A 
Codex, formerly in the possession of the Salviati at Florence, but now at Rome, contains the sections 
which are wanting in the Medicean Cod., yet with many gaps; οὗ, Mai, Spicil. Rom. VIII, Praef. p. XX. 
and p. 664, in the copy of one of the “works” which is given by Mai. 

Marini Vita Procli, ed. J. F. Fabricius, Hamburg, 1700; ed. J. F. Boissonade, Leipsic, 1814, and in 
the Cobet edition of Diog. L., Paris, 1850. Cf. A. Berger, Proclus, Exposition de sa Doctrine, Paris, 1840; 
Hermann Kirchener, De Procli neoplatonici metaphysica, Berlin, 1846; Steinhart, Art, Procluws, in Pauly’s 
Real-Ene. ἃ. cl. Alt., Vol. V1, pp. 62-76. 

Ammonii, Hermiae filit, comment. in praedicamenta Aristotelis et Porphyrii Isagogen, Venice, 1545 
seq., De Fato, ed. J. C. Orelli in his edition of the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias and others concerning 
Fate, Ziirich, 1824. 

Damascii, philosophi Platonici, quaestiones de primis principiis, ed. Jos. Kopp, Frankfort-on-the- 
Main, 1826. Cf. Ruelle, Le philosophe Damascius, étude aur sa vie et ses owvrages, Paris, 1861. 

Simplicii comment. in Arist. categorias, Venice, 1499; Basel, 1551; in Arist. physic. ed. Asulanus, 
Venice, 1526; in Ar. libros de coelo, ed. id. ibid. 1526, 1548 ete., in Ar. libros De Anima cum comment. 
Alex. Aphrod, in Arist. lib. De Sensu et Sensibili, ed. Asulanus, Venice, 1527; Simpl. comm. in Epicteti 
Enchiridion, ed. Jo. Schweighiuser, Leipsic, 1800; German by K. Enk, Vienna, 1867 (1866). Simpl. 
Comm. in quatuor libros Avistotelis De Coelo ex rec. Sim. Karstenii mandato regiae acad. disciplinarum 
Nederlandicae editus, Utrecht, 1865. On Simplicius, cf. Jo, Gottl, Buhle, De Simplicii vita, ingenio et 
meritis, in the Gott. gel. Anz. 1786, p. 19TT seq. 

Olympiodori comm. in Arist. Meteorolog. Gr. et Lat. Camotio interprete, Venet. Ald. 1550-51; Vita 
Platonis, see above, p. 99; σχόλια εἰς τὸν Πλάτωνα, σπουδῇ ᾿Ανδρ. Μουστοξύδον καὶ Anu. Σχίνα, in: Συλλογὴ 
“Ἑλληνικῶν ἀνεκδότων ποιητῶν καὶ λογογράφων, Venice, 1816, Part IV.; σχόλια εἰς Φαίδωνα, ibid. Part V.; 
Comm. in Plat. Alcibiadem. ed. F. Creuzer, in his edition of the Comm. of Proclus on the <Aleid. II. 
Frankfort, 1821; Scholia in Pl. Phaedonem, ed. Chsto. Eberh. Finckh, Heilbronn, 1847; Schol. in Pl. 
Gorgiam ed. Alb. Jahn, in Jahn’s Archiv, Vol. XTV., 1848. 

Joannis Philoponi Comm.in Arist. libros De Generatione et Interitu, ete., Venice (Ald.), 1527; in Ar. 
Analyt. Post., Venice (Ald.), 1584; contra Procl. de Mundi Aeternitate, ed. Trincayellus, Venice, 1585; 
Comm. in primos quatuor libros Arist. de Nat. Auscultatione, ed. Trincavellus, Venet. 1535; Comm. in 
Arist. libros De Anima, ed. Trincavellus, Venice, 1535; Comm. in Arist. Anql. Priora, ed. Trincayellus, 
Venice, 1536; Comm.in prim. Meteorolog. Arist. libr., etc., Venice (Ald.), 1551; Comm. in Arist. metaph, 
lat. δα: interpret. F. Patricii, Ferrara, 1583; Comm. in Nichomacht Arithm. ed. R. Hoche, Leipsic, 1864 
(See above, § 64.) 

For the literature relative to Boéthius, see below, σα § 88, Cf., further, C. Jourdain, De Porigine dee 
traditions sur le Christianisme de Boéce, Paris, 1861; G. Friedlein, Gerbert, die Geometrie des Boéthius 
und die indischen Ziffern, Erlangen, 1861 (cf. Jahn’s Jakrd., Vol. LXXXYVII. 1863, pp. 425-427); M. Can. 
tor, Math. Beitr. zum Culturleben der Volker, Halle, 1863, Sect. XIII. 


Plutarch of Athens, the son of Nestorius, born about 350, died 433, and surnamed by 
later Neo-Platonists ‘the Great,” in distinction from the historian and Platonic philoso- 
pher, who lived in the reign of Trajan, and from others of the same name, was, perhaps, a 
pupil of Priscus, who (according to Kunap., Vit. Soph., p. 102) was still teaching at Athens 
after the death of Julian. Plutarch (according to Proel., In Parm., VI. 27) distinguished 
between the One, the Nous, the Soul, the forms immanent in material things, and matter, 
and in so far seems not to have departed from the Plotinie form of doctrine. His son 
Hierius and his daughter Asclepigeneia taught with him at Athens. 

Syrianus of Alexandria, pupil of Plutarch and teacher of Proclus, regarded the Aristo- 
telian philosophy as a stepping-stone to the Platonic. He recommended, therefore, the 
study of the works of Aristotle as a preparation (προτέλεια and μικρὰ μυστήρια) for the 
Pythagorean-Platonic philosophy or theology (a prelude to the scholastic employment of 
the Aristotelian philosophy as a handmaid to Christian theology). This view and use of 
Aristotle continued among the pupils of Syrianus, and in the same spirit Proclus calls 
Aristotle δαιμόνιος, or, of demoniac rank, but Plato (and Jamblichus) θεῖος, divine. In his 


δὼ, 


ἃ 


THE ATHENIAN SCHOOL, AND NEO-PLATONIC COMMENTATORS. 257 


commentary on the Aristotelian Metaphysics, Syrianus seeks to defend Plato and the 
Pythagoreans against the attacks of Aristotle. His commentaries to Plato are no longer 
in existence. 

Hierocles of Alexandria (about 430, to be distinguished rom the Hierocles who was 
governor of Bithynia under Diocletian and figured as an opponent of Christianity) was 
another pupil of Plutarch (Phot., Bibl. Cod., 214). Since he ascribes to Ammonius Saccas, 
the founder of Neo-Platonism, the demonstration that Plato and Aristotle agreed substan- 
tially with each other, we may presume that he too was occupied with the endeavor to 
prove the same agreement. In the fragmentary remains of his writings he appears more 
particularly in the character of a moralist. A disciple of Syrianus was Hermias of Alex- 
andria, who afterward taught at the Museum in Alexandria, and was married to Atdesia, 
likewise an adherent of Neo-Platonism, and a relative of Syrianus. Another pupil of 
Syrianus was Domninus, the mathematician. 

Proclus, born at Constantinople about 411, of Lycian descent, and brought up at Xan- 
thus, in Lycia (whence his surname “ Lycius”’), was in philosophy a pupil of Olympiodorus 
(the elder) at Alexandria, of the aged Plutarch at Athens, and afterward of Syrianus. He 
taught at Athens, where he died, a. p. 485. Oppressed by the great mass of transmitted 
doctrines, all of which he nevertheless attempted to work into his system, he is said often 
to have expressed the wish that nothing had been preserved from antiquity, except the 
Oracles (λόγια χαλδαϊκά, on which Proclus wrote very full allegorical commentaries) and 
the Timaeus of Plato. 

The principal momenta in the dialectical process by which, according to Proclus, the 
formation of the world was accomplished, are the issuing of a thing from its cause and 
its return to the same. That which is brought forth is at the same time like and unlike 
its cause: in virtue of its likeness it is contained and remains in the cause (uov7); in virtue 
of its unlikeness it is separated from it (πρόοδος) ; it must return to its cause (ἐπιστροφή) by 
becoming like it, and in this return the same stadia are involved as in the previous forward 
or out-coming movement (Procli στοιχείωσις θεολογικῆ, chs. 31-38). ΑἸ] reality is subject to 
this law of triadic development. But the oftener the process is repeated the less perfect is 
the result. What is first is highest, the last is the lowest in rank and worth. The devel- 
opment is a descending one, and may be symbolized by the descending course of a spiral 
line (while the Pythagorean and Speusippic development, and in modern times the Hege- 
lian, is an ascending one). 

The primordial essence is the unity, which lies at the foundation of all plurality, the 
primal good, on which all good depends, the first cause of all existence (Jnstit., ch. 4 seq.). 
It is the secret, incomprehensible, and ineffable cause of all things, which brings forth all 
things and to which all tend to return. It can only be defined by analogy; it is exalted 
above all possible affirmation or negation; the conception of unity is inadequate fully to 
express it, since it is exalted even above unity, and so also are the conceptions of good and 
of cause (it is ἀναιτίως αἴτιον; Plat. Theol., III. p. 101 seq.; In Parm., VI. 87; In Tim., 
1106; it is πάσης σιγῆς ἀῤῥητότερον καὶ πάσης ὑπάρξεως ἀγνωστότερον, Plat. Theol., ΤΙ. 
p- 110). 

Out of this first essence Proclus represents, not (with Plotinus) the intelligible world, 
nor (with Jamblichus) a single One, inferior to the first, but a plurality of unities (évadec) 
as issuing, all of them exalted above being, life, reason, and our power of knowledge. The 
precise number of these unities (ἑνάδες) is not given by Proclus, but they are less numer- 
ous than the Ideas, and they so exist in each other as, notwithstanding their plurality, to 
constitute together but one unity. While the absolute, first essence is out of all relation 
to the world, these unities operate in the world; they are the agents of providence (Just 

17 


258 THE ATHENIAN SCHOOL, AND NEO-PLATONIC COMMENTATORS. 


Theol., 113 seq.). They are the gods (θεοί) in the highest sense of this word (ibid., 129). 
The rank of the different unities is determined according to the greater or less nearness in 
which they stand to the first essence (Jnst., 126). 

The unities are followed by the triad of the intelligible, inteiligible-intellectual, and intel- 
lectual essences (τὸ νοητόν, τὸ νοητὸν ἅμα Kat νοερόν, τὸ νοερόν, Plat. Theol., III. 14). The 
first of these falls under the concept of being (οὐσία), the second under that of life (ζωή), the 
third under that of thought (Jnst., 103 and 138; Plat. Theol., 111. p. 127 seq.). Between 
these three essences or classes of essences there exists also, notwithstanding their unity, 
an order of rank; the second participates in the first, the third in the second (Plat. Theol., 
IV. 1). The Intelligible in the narrower sense of the term, or Being (οὐσία) includes three 
triads, in each of which the two first terms are “limit” (πέρας) and ‘‘illimitation ” (ἀπεερον), 
the third terms being, in the first triad, the “union” of the two first, or ‘“ being” (μικτόν 
or οὐσία), in the second, “life” (ζωή), and in the third, “ideas,” or “that which has life in 
itself” (idéae or αὐτόζωον). In each of these triads, the first or limiting term is also 
denominated by Proclus (who follows in this particular the precedent of Jamblichus) 
“Father” (πατήρ), the second or unlimited term is called ‘‘Power” (dtvaycc), and the 
third or mixed term, ‘‘ Reason” (νοῦς). The intelligible-intellectual sphere, falling under the 
concept of life (ζωή), contains, according to Proclus, feminine divinities, and is subdivided 
into the following triads: One, Other, Being (ἕν, ἕτερον, ὄν), the triad of original numbers ; 
One and Many, Whole and Parts, Limit and Illimitation, the triad of ‘gods who hold 
together” (συνεκτικοὶ θεοί). and ἡ τὰ ἔσχατα ἔχουσα ἰδιότης, ἡ κατὰ TO τέλειον and ἡ κατὰ TO 
σχῆμα, the triad of “perfecting Gods” (τελεσιουργοὶ ϑεοί, Procl., In Tim., 94; Theolog. 
Platon., 1V. 37). The intellectual essences, lastly, falling under the concept of reason (νοῦς), 
are arranged according to the number seven, the two first terms in the triadic division, or 
the terms which correspond respectively with Being and Life, being each subject to a 
threefold subdivision, while the third term remains undivided. By a further, sevenfold 
division of each of the seven terms (or “ Hebdomas”) thus obtained, Proclus obtains seven 
intellectual Hebdomades, with the members of which he connects by allegorical interpreta- 
tion some of the deities of the popular faith and certain Platonic and. Neo-Platonic fictions, 
e. g., with the eighteenth of the forty-nine members, which he calls the “source of life” 
(πηγὴ ψυχῶν), the mixing-vessel in the Timaeus of Plato, in which the Demiurgos com- 
bines the elements of the substance of the soul with each other. 

The Psychical emanates from the intellectual. Every soul is by nature eternal and only 
in its activity related to time. The soul of the world is composed of divisible, indivisible, 
and intermediate substance, its parts being arranged in harmonious proportions. There 
exist divine, demoniacal, and human souls. Occupying a middle place between the sen- 
suous and the divine, the soul possesses freedom of will. Its evils are all chargeable upon 
itself. It is in the power of the soul to turn back toward the divine. Whatever it knows 
it knows by means of the related and corresponding elements in itself; it knows the One 
through the supra-rational unity present in itself. 

Matter is in itself neither good nor evil. It is the source of natural necessity. When 
the Demiurgos molds it according to the transcendent, ideal prototypes, there enter into 
it forms which remain immanent in it (λόγοι, the λόγοι σπερματικοί of the Stoics, Procl. in 
Tim., 4c, seq.; In Parmen., ΤΥ. 152). Proclus only repeats here the Plotinic doctrines. 

Under Marinus (of Flavia Neapolis or Sichem in Palestine), the successor of Proclus, it 
is related that the Neo-Platonic school at Athens sunk very low (Damasc., Vita Isidori, 
228). Marinus seems to ha¥e occupied himself with theosophical speculations less than 
Proclus, but more with the theory of ideas and with mathematics (ébid., 275). Con- 
disciples with Marinus were Asclepiodotus, the physician, of Alexandria, who afterward 





THE ATHENIAN SCHOOL, AND NEO-PLATONIC COMMENTATORS. 9209 


lived at Aphrodisias, and the sons of Hermias and Adesia, Heliodorus and Ammonius, 
who afterward taught at Alexandria; such also were Severianus, Isidorus of Alexandria, 
Hegias, a grandson of Plutarch, and Zenodotus, who taught with Marinus at Athens. 
Isidorus, who had also heard Proclus and who became the successor of Marinus in the 
office of Scholarch, paid greater attention to theosophy, but soon gave up his office and 
returned to Alexandria, his native city. The next Scholarch at Athens was Hegias, and 
the next after Hegias and the last of all was Damascius of Damascus (from about 520 on). 
The special object of the speculation of Damascius respecting the /irst essence was to show 
(in agreement with Jamblichus and Proclus) that the same was exalted above all those con- 
traries which inhere in the finite. 

Damascius did not long enjoy the liberty to teach. The Emperor Justinian, soon after 
his accession to the throne (A. D. 527), instituted a persecution directed against heretics 
and non-Christians, and in 529 forbade instruction to be given in philosophy at Athens, 
and confiscated the property of the Platonic school. Soon afterward (531 or 532) Damas- 
cius, Simplicius of Cilicia, the industrious and exact commentator of Aristotle, and five 
other Neo-Platonists (Diogenes and Hermias of Phcenicia, Eulamius or Eulalius of Phrygia, 
Priscianus, and Isidorus of Gaza) emigrated to Persia, where, from the traditions of the 
country, they hoped to find the seat of ancient wisdom, a people moderate and just, and 
(in King Khosroes) a ruler friendly to philosophy (Agathias, De Rebus Justiniani, II. ch. 
30). Undeceived by sorrowful experiences, they longed to return to Athens, and in the 
peace concluded between Persia and the Roman Empire in the year 533, it was stipulated 
that they should return without hindrance and retain complete liberty of belief; but the 
prohibition of philosophical instruction remained in force. The works of the ancient 
thinkers never became entirely unknown in Greece; it is demonstrable that, even in the 
period immediately following, Christian scholars of the artes liberales at Athens studied 
also philosophy; but from this time till the renadssance of classical studies, Hellenic phi- 
losophy (except where, as in the case of Synesius and Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, it 
assumed a Christian exterior) remained scarcely more than a subject of mere erudition 
(as in the cases of the Christian commentator of Aristotle, Johannes Philoponus, who was 
nearly contemporaneous with Simplicius, and David the Armenian, who flourished about 
500 a. p.; see below, § 96); gradually it, and especially the Aristotelian philosophy, won 
a growing influence on the scholastic and formal treatment of Christian theology, and in 
part also on the substance of theological doctrines. 

One of the last Neo-Platonists of antiquity was Boéthius (470-525, educated at Athens, 
480-498), who, through his Consolatio, as also through his translation and exegesis of some 
of the logical writings of Aristotle and through his annotations to his own translation of 
the Jsagoge of Porphyry and to that of Marius Victorinus (a rhetorician and grammarian, 
who lived about 350), became the most influential medium for the transmission of Greek 
philosophy to the Occident during the first centuries of the Middle Ages. 15 Consolatio 
is founded on the Platonic and Stoic idea, that the reason should conquer the emotions. 
“Ty quoque si vis lumine claro cernere verum tramite recto carpere callem : gaudia pelle, pelle 
timorem spemque fugato ne dolor adsit: Nubila mens est vinctaque frenis, haec ubi regnant!” 
(Cf. below, § 88). 









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ΕΑ ΕΣ ii: 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. 


INTRODUCTION. 


§ 71. The religious facts, ideas, and doctrines of Christianity gave 
a new impulse to philosophical investigation. The philosophic 
thought of Christian times has been mainly occupied with the theo- 
logical, cosmological, and anthropological postulates of the biblical 
doctrine of salvation, the foundation of which is the consciousness of 
the law, of sin, and of redemption. 


On the whole philosophy of Christian times, see Heinrich Ritter, Die christliche Philosophie, 2 vols., 
Gottingen, 1858-59; cf. the more minute exposition in Ritter’s Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. V. seq, 
Hamburg, 1841 seq., as also the volumes relating to this subject in the works of Brucker, Buhle, Tenne- 
mann, Hegel, and others mentioned above, p.8seq. J.G.Mussman’s Grundriss der allg. Gesch. der christ. 
Philosophie (Halle, 1830) may also be mentioned here. Ferd. Baur, in Vol. V. of the Zheolog. Jahrb. (Ti- 
bingen, 1846, pp. 29-115 and 183-283) treats in a very comprehensive manner of the nature of Christian 
philosophy, and of the principal stages in the history of its development, with special reference to the 
opinions of Ritter; ef., per contra, Heinr. Ritter, in Theol. Studien τι. Kritiken, Jahrg. XX., Vol. 2, 
1847, pp. 557-648. Cf. also, the works on ecclesiastical history and the history of dogmas, cited below, 
§ 73, p. 268. 

§ 72. The primitive creative epoch in the history of Christianity 
was followed in the Middle Ages by a period especially characterized 
by the evolution of the consciousness of opposition between God and 
the world, priests and laity, church and state, and, in general, between 
the human spirit, on the one hand, and God, the human spirit itself 
and nature, on the other, and hence by the evolution of the sense of 
the limitation and bondage of man. The period of Modern Times, 
on the contrary, is marked, in the main, by the development of the 
consciousness of restored unity, and hence of the reconciliation and 
freedom of the human spirit. In the patristic period, philosophic 
thought stands in the closest union with theological speculation, and 
co-operates in the development of Christian dogma. In the Scho- 
lastic period it passes into the service of theology, being employed 


merely to reduce to scientific form a body of dogmatic teaching for 


202 PERIODS OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 


the most part already at hand, by introducing a logical arrangement 
and bringing to. its support philosophical doctrines from ante-Chris- 
tian antiquity. In Modern Philosophy it gradually acquires, with 
reference to Christian theology and ancient philosophy, the character 
of an independent science, as regards both form and content. 


Rightly to discriminate between that which belongs to the history of philosophy and 
that which belongs to the history of theology, in the Patristic and Scholastic periods, is a 
work of uo little difficulty. The same difficulty also arises in attempting to distinguish 
between what pertains to the history of philosophy and what to the history of the natural 
sciences in modern times, when these sciences are so closely interwoven with philosophy. 
Yet the definition of philosophy as the science of principles furnishes a sufficiently accurate 
criterion. It is necessary that the exposition of the philosophy of early Christian times 
should be preceded and introduced by a consideration of the religious and theological bases 
on which society then newly reposed, and the presentation of the beginnings of Christian 
philosophy itself must necessarily include fundamental portions of the history of dogmas, 
unless the living organism of the new development of religious thought introduced by 
Christianity is to be arbitrarily dealt with, by separating, as was afterward done, a ‘‘ theo- 
logia naturalis” from “ theologia revelata.” It is only thus that an insight into the genesis 
and connection of Christian ideas becomes possible. 

The dogmas of the Church were developed in the course of the contest waged by its 
defenders against Jews and Greeks, against Judaizers, Gnostics, and heretics of all sorts. 
To this development philosophical thought lent its aid, being employed before the Council 
of Nice in elaborating and perfecting the fundamental doctrines, and subsequently in ex- 
panding them into a comprehensive complex of dogmas. Whatever was new and peculiar 
in the doctrine of Augustine was the result of the contest in which he was engaged, 
either inwardly or outwardly against the doctrines of the Manicheans, Neo-Platonists, 
Donatists, and Pelagians. But when the belief of the Church had been unfolded into a 
complex of dogmas, and when these dogmas had become firmly established, it remained 
for the School to systematize and verify them by the aid of a corresponding reconstruction 
of ancient philosophy ; in this lay the mission of Scholasticism. The distinction between the 
Patristic and the Scholastic philosophy is indeed not an absolute one, since in the Patristic 
period, in proportion as the dogmas of the Church became distinctly developed, thought 
was made subservient to the work of arranging and demonstrating them, while, on the 
other hand, in the Scholastic period, these dogmas, not having previously become com- 
pletely determined in every particular, received a certain additional development, as the 
result of the then current theologico-philosophical speculation. 

Still, the close relation of the two periods does not set aside the difference between 
them, but only serves to demonstrate what is found to be verified in detail, namely, that 
the beginnings of the scholastic manner of philosophizing recede into the time of the Church 
Fathers (witness Augustine, who in several passages of his writings enunciated the Scho- 
lastic principle that that which faith already holds to be certain should also be compre- 
hended, if possible, by the light of the reason, while, in the work De Vera Religione, he 
asserts the unity of philosophy and true religion, and in none of his writings excludes 
reason as a way to faith), and that, on the other hand, the most important Scholastics may, 
in a certain, though inferior, measure, be regarded as fathers of the Church and of its 
doctrines (some of which men have indeed received from the Church this title of honor; cf. 
below, § 76). 





‘ne 


PRINCIPAL DIVISIONS OF THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 263 


Firmst Periop or THE ΡΗΙΠΟΒΟΡΗΥ oF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. 
PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 


§ 73. The Patristic Period is the period of the genesis of Christian 
doctrine. It may be regarded as extending from the time of the 
Apostles to that of Charlemagne, and may be divided into two Sec- 
tions, separated by the Council of Nice (4. p. 325). The first section , 
includes the time of the genesis of the fundamental dogmas, when 
philosophical and theological speculation were inseparably interwoven. 
The second covers the period of the further development of the doc- 
trines of the Church on the basis of the fundamental dogmas already 
established, in which period philosophy, being used to justify these 
dogmas and co-operating in the further development of new ones, 
begins to assume a character of independence with reference to the 
dogmatic teaching of the Church. 


The works of certain of the Church Fathers were among the earliest books printed. Desiderius Eras- 
mus (lived 1467-1536), especially, did a service to Patrology by his editions (published at Basel) of Hiero- 
nymus, Hilarius, Ambrosius, and Augustine. Afterward, mostly upon the initiative of Ecclesiastical Orders, 
complete editions were set on foot, the earlier of which contained, for the most part, only the works of 
comparatively little magnitude, while in the later editions greater completeness was constantly aimed at. 
We may mention here the editions of Margarinus de la Bigne (Paris, 1575-79; 6th ed. 1654, 17 vols. fol.), 
Andr. Gallandius (Venice, 1765-71, 14 vols. fol.), and J. P. Migne (Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Paris, 
1840 seq.). The edition of Grabe (Spicilegiwm Patrum et Haereticorum saec., I-III. Oxtord, 1698), and 
Bunsen’s Analecta Ante-Nicaena (London, 1854) are confined to the works of the first three centuries. 
Compare, further, the Corpus scriptorum eccl. Latinorum ed. consilio et impensis academiae lUitt., 
Caesareae Vindobonensis (Vol. I.: Sulpicius Severus ex rec. C. Halmii, Vienna, 1866; Vol. II.: Minwciua 
Felin et Firmicus Maternus, ex rec. C. Halmii, ibid. 1867). Extracts and chrestomathies have been 
published by Résler (Bibliothek der Kirchenvdter, 10 vols., Leips. 1776-86), Augusti (Chrestomathia Pa- 
tristica, Leips. 1812), Gersdorf (Bibl. patr. eccl. Lat, sel., Leips. 1835-41), and others. A German transla- 
tion of numerous works of the Church Fathers has been published at Kempten, 1880 seq. Ante-Nicene 
Christian Library: translations [into English] of the writings of the Fathers down to A. p. 325, Edinburgh, 
T. & T. Clark, 1867 on; New York, Scribner. 

Busse, Grundriss der christ. Litteratur, Mister, 1828. J. 6. Dowling, Notitia scriptorum 8. Pa- 
trum aliorumque veteris ecclesiae monumentorum, quae in collectionibus anecdotorum post annum chr. 
MDCC. in lucem editis continentur, Oxford, 1889. 

Mohler’s Patrologie, Vol. I. (first three centuries), ed. by F. X. Reithmayr, Regensburg, 1840. Jnsti- 
tutiones Patrologiae concinnavit Jos. Fessler, Insbruck, 1850-51 (to Gregory the Great). Deutinger, 
Geist der christl. Ueberlicferung, Regensburg, 1850-51 (to Athanasius), C. Werner, Gesch. der apolo- 
getischen und polemischen Litteratur der christl. Theol,, Schatf hausen, 1861 seq. Joh. Alzog, Grundrisa 
der Patrologie oder der dltern christl, Litterdrgesch., Freiburg in Br., 1866. Cf. the works on the his- 
tory of doctrines and ecclesiastical history by Minscher, Augusti, Neander, Gieseler, Baumgarten-Crusius, 
Hase, Klee, Hagenbach, Baur, Niedner, Bohringer, etc., Dorner’s Hntwickelungsgesch. der Lehre von der 
Person Christi, Stuttgart, 2d ed., 1845-53; Baur'’s Christliche Gnosis, Tiibingen, 1835, Christliche Lehre 
von der Versdhnung, idid., 1888, and Christl. Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung Goties 
ἡδέα. 1841-48, and many other theological writings. 

Alb. Stéckl, Gesch. der Philosophie der patristischen Zeit., Wurzburg, 1859. 

doh. Huber, Die Philos. der Kirchenodter, Munich, 1859. 


264 JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES, 


§ 74. Of all the nations of antiquity, the religious sense of the 
distinction and antagonism between holiness and sin was most promi- 
nent among the Hebrews. The ethical ideal of the Hebrews was, 
however, inseparably connected with their ritual law, and the revela- 
tion of God was supposed by them to be confined to the chosen people 
of the children of Israel. The Alexandrian philosophy, which arose 
through the contact of Judaism with Hellenic culture, prepared the 
way for the breaking down of the barriers which restricted the 
moral and religious life of the people, and Christianity completed the 
work. At the time when Greek culture had destroyed the intel- 
lectual exclusiveness, and the Roman Empire had annihilated the 
political independence of the nations, there arose in Christianity, in 
opposition to the reality of the kingdom of the world, the idea of a 
kingdom of God, founded on purity of heart. The expectation of 
the Messiah among the Jewish people was spiritualized, repentance 
and moral improvement were recognized as the condition of the sal- 
vation of the soul, and the principle of all commandments was found 
in the daw of love, whence the ceremonial law, and with it all 
national, political, and social distinctions lost their earlier positive 
significance; to the poor the gospel was preached, participation in the 
kingdom of heaven was promised to the oppressed, and the conscious- 
ness of God as the Almighty Creator, the holy law-giver, and just 
judge was completed by the consciousness of redemption and divine 
sonship, through the working and indwelling of God in Christ and in 
the community of believers. 

For the literature of this topic we must here refer particularly to the theological manuals. Cf—besides 
the Introductions to the Biblical writings, by De Wette, Hug, Reuss, ete.—especially, Carl August Credner’s 
Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanon, ed. by G. Volkmar, Berlin, 1860, and Adolf Hilgenfeld’s Der 
Kanon und die Kritik des Newen Testaments in ihrer geschichtlichen Ausbildung und Gestaltung, Halle, 
1863; and, on the other hand, the numerous works on the didactic forms and the logical doctrines of the 
New Testament, as also monographs like those of Carl Niese on the Johannean Psychology (Progr. of the 


“ Landesschule” at Pforta, Naumburg, 1865), and R. Roébricht, Zur johunneischen Logoslehre, in Theol. 
Studien u. Kritiken, 1868, pp. 299-314. 


Neander (Christl. Dogmengesch., ed. by J. Jacobi, Berlin, 1857, and often in others of 
his writings; cf., also, Neander, Ueber das Verhiltniss der hellenischen Ethik zwm Christen- 
thum, in his Wissensch. Abhandlungen, ed. by J. Jacobi, Berlin, 1851), consciously adopting 
the views of Schleiermacher and not uninfluenced, whether consciously or not, by Hegelian 
conceptions, sees the peculiarity of Christianity in the idea of ‘‘redemption, the conscious- 
ness of the unification of the divine and human,” and remarks with reference to the relation 
of Christianity to Judaism and Hellenism (ébid., p. 36): “The religious stand-point of Juda- 
ism represents in general the positive consciousness of alienation from God and of the 
schism in man’s nature, while Hellenism, on the contrary, is the embodiment of youthful 
natural life, as yet unconscious of its opposition to God. For those occupying the former 





JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES. 265 


stand-point Christianity aims at removing the sense and the fact of opposition and discord, 
through redemption: for those occupying the stand-point of Hellenism, it first brings to 
consciousness the sense of discord, and provides for the communication of divine life to 
humanity, through the removal of this discord.” (In the same place Neander designates as 
the fundamental trait of Orientalism, in the Hindoo and other natural religions, the 
“schism and unrest of the human mind, as manifested in the language of sorrow and 
melancholy, in view of the limits of human nature, and in uncontrolled longings after the 
infinite and for absorption into God.”) Cf. above, § 5. 

In his own teaching, which was expressed especially in aphorisms and parables, 
Jesus laid chief emphasis on the necessity of rising above the legal righteousness of the 
Pharisees (Matt. v. 20) to the ideal completion of the law through the principle of love, and 
to the real fulfillment of the law as thus completed. The commandments and prohibitions 
of Moses (including those of the ceremonial law), and even many of the injunctions of his 
suecessors, were thus left substantially untouched (although in the matter of things purely 
external and of no immediate ethical or religious significance, such, in particular, as the 
observance of the Sabbath and various forms of purification and sacrifice, actual observance 
was made by the Messiah no longer obligatory for the subjects of his “kingdom of God,” 
Mark ii. 23-28; vii. 14-23, etc.); but that which Moses had allowed on account of the 
hardness of heart of his people remained no longer lawful, but was to be regulated in 
accordance with the ideal ethical law, which took cognizance of the intentions of men. 
Thus the peremptoriness of the requirements of ethics was made to appear not in the least 
relaxed, but rather increased. (Hence the declaration in Matt. vy. 18—true, of course, only 
in a figurative sense—that till the end of the world no jot or tittle of the law should be 
abrogated, if indeed this verse, in the form here given, is authentic and has not been em- 
phasized by the reporter, in opposition to a party of Pauline or ultra-Pauline Antinomians, 
so as to make the declaration more positive than it was as delivered by Jesus, and more in 
accordance with the sentiment of the Jewish Christians, who required that even the Mes- 
sias should keep the whole law.) It is not that Moses had given only a ceremonial law and 
that Christ had recognized only the moral law; the law of love was taught, although in more 
limited form, already by the former (Lev. xix. 18; ef. Deut. vi. 5, xxx. 16, on love to God, 
and such passages as Is. lviii. 7, in the writings of the prophets who foreshadowed and 
prepared the way for the ideality of the Christian law), and the ritual retains a certain 
authority with the latter (at least, according to the Gospel of Matthew; Mark and Luke do 
not affirm the continuing authority of the Law). But the relative importance of the two 
elements becomes reversed in consequence of the radical significance attached by Christ 
to the law of love (Matt. xxii. 34 seq.; Mark xii. 28 seq. ; Luke x. 25 seq.) and also in conse- 
quence of the name of Father, by which he (in a manner at most only suggested in the Old 
Testament) indicated that the relation of man to God should be one of friendly intimacy. 
Sometimes Jesus appeals directly to passages of the Old Testament (such as 1 Sam. xy. 
22 and xxi. 6, Hos. vi. 6, in Matt. ix. 13, xii. 3); the prophetic picture of the Messianic 
kingdom, in which peace and joy were to reign, and strife should no longer dwell (Is. ix. 
et al.), involved the idea of actualized, all-embracing love; the Nazarite’s vow of the Old 
Testament implied the insufficiency of common righteousness and the necessity of ex- 
ceeding it by the practice of abstinence; and perhaps also the principles and regimen of 
the Essenes exerted (through John the Baptist) some influence on Jesus (ef. A. Hilgenfeld, 
Der Essitsmus und Jesus, in the Zeitschr. f. wiss. Theol., X. 1, 1867, pp. 97-111). Jesus, 
the disciple of John, feeling himself, from the time of his baptism by John, the herald of 
the Messiah, to be himself the Messiah, not inferior even to Moses in dignity (according 
to Deut. xviii. 15), and intrusted by God with imperishable authority and an eternal king- 


266 JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES. 


dom (Dan. vii. 13, 14), believed himself called and had the courage to found a kingdom of 
God, to gather about him the weary and heavy-laden, to advance beyond all established 
forms, and to teach and live rather in accordance with the suggestions of his own moral 
consciousness and the wants of the people, with whom he was in sympathy, than accord- 
ing to traditional institution. The principle of pure love to man prevailed over conceptions 
of Oriental derivation and in spite of the lack of developed notions of labor, and of inde- 
pendence, property, right, and state, as reposing on labor. In the love with which he 
worked for his friends, in his unconditional opposition to the previous leaders of the 
people and to all other hostile powers, and in his death thus brought about, yet willingly 
accepted in the confident expectation that he should return, and while fearlessly avow- 
ing, in the face of death, his Messianic authority, the life of Jesus appears as a picture 
of perfect righteousness. His prayer that God might forgive his judges and enemies 
involved the unshaken conviction of his absolute right, and the same conviction continued 
after his death among his disciples. In the kingdom of God founded by the Messiah, 
blessedness was to dwell together with holiness. Jesus prayed that God’s name might 
be sanctified, his kingdom come, his will be done, and that earthly need might be re- 
moved, together with sin. To the weary and heavy-laden relief was promised through 
the removal of the weight of external tyranny and of personal poverty, sickness, and 
sinfulness, and through the confirmation in the relation of sonship to God and in the 
hope of eternal blessedness of all such as belonged to the kingdom of God. Jesus pre- 
supposed for those, to whom his preaching was addressed, the same immediate possibility 
of elevation to purity of heart and to moral perfection, 7. 6., to the image of the perfect God, 
the Heavenly Father, of which he was conscious in his own case. 

The moral doctrine and life of Jesus involved, as logical consequences, the obsolescence 
of the Mosaic law of rites, and with this the overthrow of the national barriers of Judaism. 
These consequences were first expressly enunciated by Paul, who in proclaiming them was 
always conscious of his dependence on Christ (‘not I, but Christ in me,” Gal. ii. 20). On 
the ground of his own personal experience, from which he dogmatically drew general 
conclusions for all men, Paul declared that the power necessary for the fulfillment of the 
purely moral law and the way to true spiritual freedom were to be found only in faith in 
Christ. Paul denies the dependence of salvation on law and nationality or on anything 
whatever that is external (here ‘‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, 
neither male nor female,” Gal. iii. 28; cf. vi. 15: οὔτε περιτομῇ οὔτ᾽ ἀκροβυστία, ἀλλὰ καινὴ 
κτίσις, and also Rom. x. 12; 2 Cor. v.17). Positively, he makes it dependent on the free grace 
of God, the appropriation of which on the part of the individual is effected through faith in 
Christ as the Redeemer. The law was the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ (παιδαγωγὸς 
εἰς Χριστόν͵ Gal. iii. 24). Through faith the inner man is built up (ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος, Rom. vii. 
22; Ephes. iii. 16; cf. Rom. ii. 29; 1 Pet. iii. 4; ef. also ὁ ἐντὸς ἄνθρωπος in Plat., Rep. IX., 
p. 589 a—where, however, this expression is based on a developed comparison—and ὁ ἔσω 
λόγος in opposition to ἔξω λόγος in Arist., Analyt. Post., I. 10). The law furnishes no 
deliverance from the schism between the spirit, which wills the good, and the flesh, which 
does what is evil; but through Christ this schism is removed, the impotence of the flesh is 
overcome by his Spirit dwelling in us (Rom. vii. and viii). Faith is reckoned to man by 
God as righteousness, and by making man a recipient of the Spirit of Christ, it restores to 
him the power, lost since the time of Adam’s fall, truly to fulfill the moral law. With con- 
secration to Christ, the Redeemer, there arises, in place of the servile condition of fear in 
view of the penalty threatened against the transgressor of the law, the free condition of 
sonship, of communion with God in love, the state of justification by faith. The believer, 
says Paul, has put on Christ in baptism; Christ is to be formed in him; as Christ desce nded 





; 


JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES. 267 


ito death and rose again, so the believer, by virtue of his union with him, dies unto 
sin, crucifies the flesh, with its lusts and desires, and rises to a new moral life in the 
spirit, the fruits of which are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 
meekness, temperance (Gal. ii. 17; ili, 27; iv. 19; v. 22-24; Rom. vi. 1; viii. 12 seq.,; 
xiii. 14). But the believer has in this life only the first-fruits of the Spirit (ἀπαρχὴ τοῦ 
πνεύματος, Rom. viii. 23); we are indeed saved, but only in hope, and we walk in patience 
(Rom. viii. 24 seq.); we walk still by faith, not by sight (διὰ πίστεως περιπατοῦμεν͵ ov 
διὰ εἴδους, 2 Cor. y. 1). The new life is (according to 1 Cor. xv. 23) to be introduced by 
the second coming of Christ (when, according to 1 Thess. iv. 17, the living and those 
raised from the grave are to ascend on clouds to the presence of the Lord, cf. John’s Rev. 
xi. 12). Paul, like Christ, sees in love the substance of the moral law (Gal. v. 14: ὁ yap 
πᾶς νόμος ἐν ἑνὶ λόγῳ πληροῦται, Ev τῷ ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς ἑαυτόν, Gal. Vi. 2: τὸν 
νόμον τοῦ Χριστοῦ, Rom. xiii. 8-10: ὁ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἕτερον, νόμον πεπλήρωκε"... πλήρωμα 
οὖν νόμου ἡ ἀγάπη, cf. 1 Cor. ix. 21; Rom. iii. 27; viii. 2). Love is the last and supreme 
word of Christianity; it is superior even to faith and hope (1 Cor. xiii. 13). Love is the 
active expression of faith (Gal. v. 6: πίστις dc’ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη)ῆ. The Pauline doctrine 
of the relation between faith and love was of a nature calculated powerfully to stimulate 
thought with reference to the question as to the bond connecting these two elements of the 
religious life. If love or a morally perfect will is logically involved in the very conception 
of faith (as may be inferred from Gal. iii. 26; v. 6; Rom. vi. 3 seq.; viii. 1 seq.; 1 Cor. xii. 
3), and if, therefore, the justification which is by faith means the divine recognition of an 
essential righteousness contained in it (¢. 6.,ὄ in other words, if the divine justifying sen- 
tence—to follow, as may be and has been done, the Kantian terminology—is an “ analytical 
judgment respecting the subjective moral quality of the believer”), then, on the one hand, 
the necessary connection of essential moral goodness with the historic and dogmatic ele- 
ments involved in faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the son of God, is not demonstrated, 
and, on the other, we seem rather to be led to the non-Pauline sequence of faith, begin- 
ning of regeneration and sanctification, and relative justification in proportion to the degree 
of sanctification already attained, than to the Pauline one of faith, justification, and sancti- 
fication. But if, on the contrary, faith does not necessarily involve love (as may appear 
from Rom. iv. 19; x. 9, etc.), and enters only as a new statutory element, a Christian 
substitute for Jewish offerings and ceremonies (i. e., if God’s justification of believers is 
only a “synthetic judgment,” an imputation of another’s righteousness), then the improve- 
ment of the will and life remains indeed a thing required, but no longer appears as a 
necessary consequence of faith, and the moral advantage possessed by him who believes 
in the real death and resurrection of Christ, and considers himself redeemed from guilt 
and punishment by the merit of Christ, over those who are not of the same faith, can 
only be arbitrarily asserted, since it is by no means verified in all instances by the facts 
of experience. It follows also, in case the believing sinner, to whom righteousness has 
been imputed, fails to advance to real righteousness, that the divine justification of the 
morally unimproved believer, together with the condemuation of others, must appear 
arbitrary, partisan, and unjust, and unrestricted liberty is left to men for the frivolous mis- 
use of forgiving grace as a license to sin. Ata later period, when attempts were made to 
transform the half-mystic and half-religious ideas of Paul respecting dying and rising again 
with Christ into dogmatic conceptions, this difficulty of interpretation (which in recent 
times Schleiermacher sought to solve by defining justifying faith as the appropriation to 
one’s self of the perfection and beatitude of Christ, 7. 6., as the giving up of one’s self to 
the Christian ideal) appeared with increasing distinctness, and gave occasion to manifold 
theological and philosophical attempts at explanation, as the Epistle of James may witnesa 


268 JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES. 


The Early Catholic Church went forward to the point of making the moral law and theo- 
retical dogmatic faith co-ordinate, while in Augustinism, in the Reformation, and again in 
the theological and philosophical ethics of modern times, the dialectic resulting from the 
Pauline conceptions has repeatedly reappeared in ever-varying form. 

Although Paul recognized love (which, first implied in the requirement to give to the 
poor and in the principle of community in the possession of goods, rose subsequently, 
through idealization and generalization, to the rank of a pure conception) as the highest 
element in Christianity, he nevertheless treats in his Epistles chiefly of faith, as of that by 
which the law is abolished. In the Epistles of John, on the contrary, and in the (fourth) 
Gospel, which bears his name, love occupies the central position. God, says John, is love 
(1 John iy. 8, 16). His love has been made known in the sending of his Son, in order 
that all who believe on Him may have eternal life (1 John iv. 9; John’s Gosp. iii. 16). 
He who abides in love abides in God and God in him. The new commandment of Christ 
is love. He who loves God must love his brother also. Our love to God is manifested 
when we keep his commandments and walk in the light (John xiii. 34; xv. 12; 1 John 
i. 7; iv. 16, 21; v. 2). Believers are born of God. They are hated of the world; but the 
world lies in wickedness (John xv. 18 et al.; 1 John v. 19). In place of the contest waged 
by Paul against single concrete powers, especially against the continued validity of the 
Mosaic law, we have here a contest against the ‘‘ world” in general, against all tendencies 
opposed to Christianity, against unbelieving and hostile Jews and Gentiles. The distince- 
tion between the chosen Jewish people and the heathen is that between believers in 
Christ, who walk in the light, and unbelievers and children of darkness, and the temporal 
distinction between the present period and the future is changed into the ever-present dis- 
tinction between the world and the kingdom of God, which is the kingdom of the Spirit 
and of truth. The belief that Jesus is the Christ is made the power that overcomes the 
world. That the law came by Moses, but grace and truth by Jesus (John i. 17) appears 
already as an assured conviction. The law is abrogated, religious life is no longer to be 
nourished and filled up with offerings and ceremonies; and into the place thus left vacant 
enters, together with the practical activity required by love, a form of theoretical specula- 
tion arrived at through the development of the doctrine of faith. 

In the Gospel named after Matthew, Jesus is styled the Messiah, the Son of David, 
who as such is also the Son of God; this phraseology is here employed with immediate 
reference to the expectations of the Jewish nation. In the Gospel according to Mark, he 
is generally spoken of as the Son of God, the expression “Son of David” being employed 
only once (x. 47 seq., in the mouth of the blind man of Jericho). In this Gospel the con- 
tinuing validity of the Jewish law is no longer affirmed. The recognition of Christ as the 
Son of God in the Epistles of Paul and in the Gospel of Luke, which bears the impress of 
Pauline ideas, is an expression of the sense of the universal or absolute character of the 
Christian religion. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (which is likewise Pauline in character 
and was possibly written by Barnabas or Apollos) the superiority of Christianity in dignity 
to Judaism and of the New Covenant to the Old Covenant, with its laws, which are no longer 
binding on Christians, is expressed by the affirmation of the personal exaltation of Jesus 
above Moses and above the angels, through whose agency the law was given. In this Epis- 
tle it is said of Christ as the Son of God, that by him the world-periods (αἰῶνες) were created, 
that he is the brightness of the divine glory, the image of the divine nature (ἀπαύγασμα kat 
χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως), the eternal high-priest after the order of Melchisedek, king of 
priests, to whom even Abraham made himself subject, and to whom therefore the Levites, 
as children of Abraham, are also inferior. Repentance and turning away from dead works, 
and faith in God, are reckoned by the author of this Epistle as the elementary requirements 


JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES. 269 


of Christianity, as the milk or foundation from which it is necessary to advance to ‘‘ strong 
meat” or “perfection.” This Epistle contains already the seeds of the later Gnostic doc- 
trines. The fourth Gospel, named after the Apostle John, teaches the pure spirituality of 
God’s nature, and demands that God should be worshiped in spirit and in truth. It recog- 
nizes in Christ the Logos become flesh, who was from eternity with God and through whom 
God created the world and reveals himself to man; the Logos became flesh and “ οὗ his full- 
ness (ἐκ Tov πληρώματος αὐτοῦ) have all we received, and grace for grace.” 

Yet, however weighty and pregnant may have been the conceptions which Christ’s 
immediate and indirect disciples may have formed of his person, it is, nevertheless, not 
true that ‘‘the proper basis and the vital germ of Christian doctrine” are to be sought in 
them (see Huber, in his excellent work entitled Philosophie der Kirchenviter, Munich, 1859, 
p. 8; on p. 10 Huber affirms, adopting the sentiment expressed by Schelling in his Philos. 
der Offenbarung, Werke, 11. 4, p. 35, that ‘‘ Christ was not the teacher and founder, but the 
content of Christianity”); this basis and this germ are contained rather in Jesus’ ethical 
requirement of inward righteousness, purity of heart, and love, and in his own practice of 
the things he required (and Huber, on p. 8 of the work cited above, justly acknowledges 
that the source of those conceptions [of Christ’s person] was the life and doctrine of 
Jesus—which acknowledgment, however, involves an essential limitation of Huber’s assent 
to Schelling’s doctrine). 

Without prejudice to the essential originality and independence of the principles of 
Christianity, it must be admitted that previous to their formal enunciation they had been 
foreshadowed and the ground had been prepared for them partly in the general principles 
of Judaism, and partly and more particularly in connection with the attempt among the 
Jews to revive the ancient gift of prophecy (a movement to which Parsee influences con- 
tributed, and which lay at the foundation of Essenism) and (after the time of Paul and of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews, and especially after the first development of Gnosticism and 
the production of the fourth Gospel) in the religious philosophy of the Alexandrian Jews, 
which arose through the contact of Judaism with Hellenism. The essential object of the 
allegorical interpretation of Scripture and of theosophy was to spiritualize the ideas con- 
tained in the Old Testament. The sensible manifestations of God were interpreted as 
manifestations of a divine power distinct from God and operating in the world. As in 
Aristobulus and in the Book of Maccabees (iii. 39) the power (δύναμις) of God, which dwells 
in the world, is distinguished from God in his extra-mundane, absolute existence, and as 
in the Proverbs (viii. 22 seq.) and the Book of Wisdom (vii. seq.) the Wisdom of God is 
distinguished from God himself, so Paul proclaims Christ as the power and wisdom of 
God (1 Cor. i. 24: κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν Θεοῦ Δύναμιν καὶ Θεοῦ Σοφίαν). Philo terms God the 
cause (αἴτιον) of the world, by (ὑπὸ) whom it had its origin, distinguishing from him the 
Logos, through (διὰ) whom he formed it, and the four elements which constitute it mate- 
rially; in like manner, in the Epistle to the Hebrews the Son of God is represented as he 
through whom (δύ ov) God creates, and according to the Gospel of John all things that 
were created were created through (διὰ) the Logos (John i. 3 and 10: δ αὐτοῦ). But the 
Alexandrian theosophy did not admit the possibility of the incarnation of the divine Logos, 
nor could it admit this, since, according to it, matter was impure, and the descent of the 
soul into a mortal body was the penalty of moral delinquency on the part of the former. 
For the adherents of this theosophy, therefore, the identification of the Messiah with the 
divine Logos was impossible. They were waiting for the coming of the Messiah at the 
time when Jesus recognized himself as the Messiah already come. They did not perceive 
in the commandment of love to man the radical and positive expression for the spirituali- 
zation of the law. They did not draw from their spiritualization of the law, the (Pauline) 


270 JESUS AND HIS APOSTLES. 


consequence, that now, since the Messiah had appeared, the ancient law in its literal sense 
was no longer binding on those who believed in him. They did not suffer the ceremonial 
worship of the God revealed to the Jews to be replaced by the worship of God in spirit 
and in truth. These radical differences indicate that the Alexandrian philosophy belongs 
to the ante-Christian period, and it can only be regarded as one of the stepping-stones, 
although it must at the same time be received as the last and nearest stepping-stone, to 
Christianity. Cf. above, § 63. 

Monotheism as a world-religion could only go forth from Judaism. The triumph of 
Christianity was the triumph over polytheism of the religious idea of the Jewish people, 
stripped of its national limitations and softened and spiritualized. This triumph was com- 
pletely analogous to that won by the Hellenic language, and by Hellenic art and science, 
in the kingdoms founded by Alexander the Great and afterward reduced under Roman 
supremacy, only that the struggle in the field of religion was all the more severe and 
wearisome, as the elements of permanent worth which were contained in the polytheistic 
religioazs were more numerous. When national exclusiveness had once given way to the 
active commerce of nations and to the unity of the world-empire, it was necessary that, 
in place of a plurality of forms of culture existing side by side, one of them should 
gradually become dominant, which was strongest, most elevated, and most developed, or, 
in other words, that Greek language, art, and science, Roman law (and also, for the West, 
the Roman language), and either Greco-Roman or the (universalized, denationalized) Jewish 
religion should become predominant. The Jews—especially those outside of Palestine— 
although still holding on to monotheism, had begun to feel the unfitness of the further 
maintenance of the positive law, and the circumstances of the time even necessitated its 
abrogation. So soon, therefore, as an authority for such abrogation—an authority at once 
satisfactory to the religious consciousness of the Jews and not repugnant to non-Jews 
(who would have nothing to do with Judaism as traditionally constituted)—was found in 
the divine-human Messiah, the superior of Moses and Abraham (albeit that the Messiah, 
while on earth, had not pronounced this abrogation, perhaps had not willed it, and had 
only furnished for it a possible point d’appui through his new commandments, which went 
beyond the requirements of mere positive legality), so soon as this condition was met, 
as it was by the Apostle Paul, it was inevitable that the contest of religions should begin. 
It was necessarily more difficult for the new tendency to make headway within the sphere 
of Judaism and among those believers who held fast to the letter of the commandments 
of the Messiah who had personally lived among them, than within the sphere of Hellenism, 
although the latter did not yield to it without violent opposition, and, when it finally yielded, 
so filled the new movement with essential elements of its own, that in a certain sense Chris- 
tianity, although sprung from Judaism, can justly be called the synthesis and product of 
both Judaism and Hellenism—a synthesis superior to either of its elements. These two 
factors, under the influence of new motives that afterward arose, were at a later period 
again arrayed in opposition within the fold of Christianity, and primitive Catholicism was 
the first victorious reconciliation of them. 

As contrasted with Judaism, Christianity was marked by its greater spirituality, and 
hence struck the positivists of the ancient faith, who could not bring themselves to 
approve the Pauline abrogation of the law, as a free-thinking scandal (σκάνδαλον, 1 Cor. 
i. 23). To the cultivated Hellenes the doctrine of a crucified God of Jewish race was a 
superstitious folly (μωρία, tbid.), for which reason not many of high station accepted it 
(1 Cor. i. 26 seq.). But the weak, the heavy-laden, and oppressed heard gladly the tidings 
of the God who had descended to their low condition and the preaching of a future resur- 
rection to beatific life. Not the religion of cheerful contentment, but consolation in mis-+ 











SS 


JEWISH AND PAULINE CHRISTIANITY. Ο71 


fortune, was what their wants demanded. Their opposition to their oppressors found in 
faith in Christ a spiritual support, and the commandment of love furnished to the principle 
of mutual help a powerful motive. And now after the destruction of the political inde 
pendence of the cities and nations which had before been either constantly engaged in 
feuds and wars with each other, or else had existed entirely apart from each other, far 
greater importance was attached than before to the material and spiritual interests of the 
individual, to personal morality and happiness. The union of men of like mind from 
among the most different peoples and civil communities in one religious society now first 
became possible, and acquired a higher spiritual charm. The existence of a world- 
monarchy was favorable to the idea of religious unity and to the preaching of concord and 
love. A religion which in its theoretical as well as its positive groundwork should rest, 
not on ancient national conceptions, but on the more comprehensive, less poetic, and more 
reflective consciousness of the present, became a necessity. It could not be otherwise than 
that the more simple and popular doctrine of the Gospel should triumph over such artificial 
attempts in the interest of an intellectual aristocracy and foreign to the popular belief, 
among the later Stoics and the Neo-Platonists, as were made to furnish new interpretations 
and combinations of pagan doctrines. The authors of these attempts did not dare, and 
were unable to guard unchanged the Old-Hellenic principle in the presence of Christianity ; 
for the allegorical interpretation of the myths of Paganism was only a proof that those 
who professed to believe them were ashamed of them, and thus prepared the way for 
the triumph of Christianity, which openly rejected them. But after the dissolution of the 
ethical harmony which characterized the bloom of Hellenic antiquity, and as a consequence 
of the increasing moral degeneracy of the times, moral health, salvation, was held to 
depend primarily on self-purification through renunciation of the world, on the ‘“cruci- 
fixion of the lusts and desires,” and on self-consecration to an ethical ideal, whose charac- 
teristic was not that it artistically transfigured the present natural life, but that it ele- 
vated the spirit above it. With many the fear of the threatened pains of hell and the 
hope of the promised salvation and blessedness of the members of the kingdom were 
very powerful motives. It should also be added that the blood of the martyrs became, 
through the attention and respect transferred from their persons to their cause, a seed of 
the church. 


§ 75. The opposition between Judaism and Hellenism reappeared, 
though in a sense and in a measure which were modified by the com- 
munity of the opposing parties in Christian principle, within the circle 
of Christianity itself, in the division of the Jewish from the Gentile 
Christians. Jewish Christianity united with faith in Jesus as the Mes- 
siah the observance of the Mosaic law. Gentile Christianity, on the 
contrary, arose from the Pauline conception of Christianity as con- 
sisting in justification and sanctification through Christ, without the 
works of the law. But both parties agreeing in the recognition of 
Jesus as the Messiah and in the adoption of the moral law of love as 
promulgated by him, this opposition yielded to the desire for Chris- 
tian unity (which sentiment was most powerful in mixed churches, 
like that at Rome). A canon of the writings of all the Apostles, differ- 
ing but little from our own, was constituted, in which the Johannean 


272 JEWISH AND PAULINE CHRISTIANITY. 


Gospel was added to the three first of our Gospels, all others being 
rejected, and with these a collection of Apostolical writings was com- 
bined. Finally, the early Catholic Church was founded, which con- 
ceived Christianity as essentially contained in the new law of love; 
the Mosaic law of ceremonies was abolished, as no longer binding 
on those who should believe in Christ, and in connection with the 
development and completion of a new hierarchical constitution, a 
rule of faith was established, having the form of a law. The rule of 
faith related chiefly to the objective conditions of salvation. The 
conceptions of God, and of his only-begotten Son and of the Holy 
Ghost—conceptions which, chiefly through the formula of baptism, 
were becoming universally fixed in the Christian consciousness—lay 
at its basis, and it was directed against Judaism, on the one hand, 
and, on the other, against those speculations of the Gnostics, which 
were not in correspondence with the common sentiment of the Chris- 
tian churches. 


Aug. Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion wnd Kirche, 3d ed., Gotha, 1856; 
Gesch. der Phanzung und Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel, Hamburg, 1832, 5th 
ed., Gotha, 1862; Christ. Dogmengesch., hrsg. von J. L. Jacobi, Berlin, 1851. Rich. Rothe, Die Anfange der 
christl. Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, Vol. 1., Wittenberg, 1837. Ferd. Christian Baur, Paulus der 
Apostel Jesu Christi, Tibingen, 1845; Lehrbuch der christl. Dogmengesch., 2d ed., Stuttgart, 1858; Vor- 
lesungen tiber die neutestamentl. Theologie, hreg. von Ferd. Friedr. Baur, Leips. 1864; Vorl. tiber die 
christl. Dogmengesch. (posthumous publication), Tiibingen, 1865; Das Christenthum und die christl. 
Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 3d ed., ibid. 1863; Die christl. Kirche vom Anfang des vierten bis 
zum Ende des sechsten Jahrhunderts, 2d ed., ibid. 1863. Albert Schwegler, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter 
in den Hauptmomenten seiner Entwickelung, Tiibingen, 1846. Albrecht Ritschl, Die Hntstehung der alt- 
katholischen Kirche, 2d ed., Bonn, 1857. Ad. Hilgenfeld, Das Urehristenthum in den Hauptwende- 
punkten seines Entwicklungsganges, Jena, 1855. Cf. the numerous articles of Hilgenfeld in his Zettschr. 
f. wiss. Theol., and Heinrich Holtzmann’s Judenthum und Christenthum, Leipsic. 1867. Ph. Schaff, Ge- 
schichte der Apost. Kirche, 2d ed., Leipsic, 1854; Geschichte der alten Kirche, 3 vols., 2d ed., Leipsic, 1869. 
(The same in English, New York.] 


The early Catholic Church, although numbering both Jewish Christianity and Paulinism 
among its antecedents, and containing certain elements derived from both, was neverthe- 
less more immediately an outgrowth from the latter, or from Gentile Christianity. In the 
abrogation of the Mosaic law and of national barriers on the ground of the new principle 
of faith in Christ, it was in material agreement with Paulinism. But in form it was less 
removed from Judaism and from Jewish Christianity, on account of the legal character 
with which it invested the Christian principle in matters of faith, charity, and church 
order. For it Christianity was essentially a new law (John xiii. 34: ἐντολὴ καινή ; οἵ, Gal. 
vi. 2, where Paul speaks of that love which manifests itself in acts of mutual assistance, 
as the “law of Christ,” in distinction from the Mosaic law, and 1 Cor. xi. 25, 2 Cor. iii. 6, 
and Heb. viii. 13: καινὴ διαθήκη, Epist. Barnabae, Il. 4; nova lex Jesu Christi). The pre- 
dilection for the legal form in matters of faith, practice, and constitution, may be explained 
partly by the influence which the legal religion and hierarchy of the Old Testament, how- 
ever modified and idealized by Christianity, could not but exert on the Gentile Christians 
{and this, tov, without conscious “concessions” to the opposing party, which were only 





JEWISH AND PAULINE CHRISTIANITY. 273 


made incidentally and far more by a fraction of the Jewish Christians than by the Gentile 
Christians), as also by the influence of early Christian tradition, especially that of the 
λόγια Kupiaxa, or ‘‘ Words of the Lord,” and partly by the ecclesiastical necessity which 
existed of advancing from the subjective conceptions of Paul to objective norms and by 
the moral reaction which took place against ultra-Pauline Antinomianism.* In like manner, 
precisely, the transition from Luther’s faith to Luther’s articles of faith, and, later, to the 
symbols of the Lutheran Church, was due partly to the surviving influence of the old 
Chureh, in spite of all the opposition which was directed against it, and partly to the 
inherent necessity of objective norms and to the reaction excited by extreme reformatory 
attempts. 

The Jewish Christians, who united with the observance of the Mosaic law a belief in 
the Messianic dignity of Jesus, were divided, after the commencement of Paul’s ministry. 
into two factions. The more rigid of them denied the apostolic character of Paul, 
and refused to recognize as members of the Messiah’s kingdom those Christians who 
were born in heathenism, except upon the condition of their being circumcised; the less 
rigid of them, on the contrary, conceded the authority of Paul to labor among the Gentiles, 
and only demanded of believers conyerted from heathenism the observance of those things 
which had been prescribed by the Jews for the proselytes of the gate (in accordance with 
the so-called decree of the Apostles, Acts xv. 29: ἀπέχεσθαι εἰδωλοθύτων καὶ αἵματος καὶ 
πνικτοῦ καὶ πορνείας, whereas in Gal. ii. 10 only the contribution for the poor at Jerusalem 


* Neander designates, in addition to the fact of the diminished power and purity of the religious spirit 
in the post-Apostoiic times, the example of the Old Testament, whose influence was first and most directly 
manifest in the constitution of the Church, as the cause of the development of a new discipline of law in the 
early Catholic Church. Baur and Schwegler emphasize most the idea of the snecessive development and 
reconciliation of the opposition between Jewish Christianity and Panlinism, but both of them (and espe- 
cially Schwegler) ascribe to Jewish Christianity (which is chiefly of historical importance only as having 
directly preceded Paulinism) in the post-Pauline period (in which, under the name of Ebionitism, it con- 
tinued to be powerful until near the year 155, after which it was scarcely more than a rapidly-declining 
remnant of the past) perhaps a more widespread acceptation and influence than are actually demonstrable or 
internally probable. Albert Ritschl, on the other hand, is a prominent representative of those who argue 
that Catholic Christianity was not the result of a reconciliation effected between Jewish and Gentile Chris- 
tians, but a stage in the history of Gentile Christianity alone. The transformation of Paunlinism into 
Catholie Christianity was occasioned, says Ritschl, by the need in the Church of norms of thought and life 
which should possess universal validity. With Paul the theoretical and the practical were blended, with a 
touch of mysticism, in the conception of faith, and this blending was in harmony with the peculiarities of 
his character and experience. What with Panl, therefore, was living and mobile, the church sought to 
express in fixed formulus, a result which could only be attsined at the expense of the peculiar warmth and 
elevation of the Christianity of Paul (Ritschl, Hntstehung der altkath. Kirche, 1st ed., p. 273). In the 
second edition of his work Ritschl maintains that the question is not whether the early Catholic Church 
was developed on the basis of Jewish Christianity or on that of Paulinism. but whether it was developed 
out of Jewish or out of Gentile Christianity. The peculiar marks of Gentile Christianity, as he further 
remarks, were the rejection of Jewish customs and the entertainment of the belief that they, the Gentile 
Christians, had entered into the place of the Jews in the covenant relation with God (both of which were 
rendered possible only through the initiative taken by Paul), and he continues: * The Gentile Christians 
needed first to be instructed concerning the unity of God and the history of his covenant-revelation, con- 
cerning moral righteousness and judgment, sin and redemption, the kingdom of God and the Son of God, 
before they could begin to attend to the dialectical relations between sin and law, grace and justification, 
faith and righteousness” (2d ed., p. 272); they accepted the equal authority of all the Apostles, including 
Paul, but they involuntarily interpreted the teachings of the Apostles so as to find in them Christ repre- 
sented as a lawgiver and the believer's religious relation to him as involving simply the acceptance of the 
“rule of faith” and the fulfillment of Christ's law (¢bid., p. 580 seq.). Ritsehl’s meritorious work appears 
only to need, for its completeness, a more minute inquiry into the historical development of dogmas. and 
more particularly into the development of the Johannean doctrine, of Gnosticism, and of the reaction 
against the latter. 


18 


274 THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 


is mentioned, the only condition to which Paul could assent without favoring a relapse 
into the legality against which he made war). The milder fraction, which granted tolera- 
tion to the Gentile Christians, had in the time of Justin already sunk to the condition of a 
tolerated party (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 47). The more exacting fraction lost its hold in propor- 
tion as the antagonism between Christians and Jews became more pronounced. The 
decree issued after the suppression of the rising under Barkochba (135 A. D.), which 
forbade the Jews to remain in Jerusalem, excluded also all Jewish Christians living accord- 
ing to Jewish law from this center of Christendom, and permitted only a Christian com- 
munity which had renounced the Mosaic law to exist there, under a bishop chosen from 
among the Gentile Christians; and finally the primitive Catholic Church, whose consti- 
tution was effected with the recognition of a complete apostolic canon (about 175 A. D.), 
excluded from its fold all Jewish Christians as heretics (so that henceforth they continued 
to exist only as a sect), while it rejected, on the other hand, as false, a one-sided, ultra- 
Pauline Antinomianism and Gnosticism, which threatened to lead to the destruction of 
morality itself and to the dissolution of the connection of Christianity with its Old Testa- 
ment basis. 

These differences among the early Christians were among the causes which led to the 
beginnings of Christian philosophical speculation (for which reason they could not remain 
tumentioned here). 


FIRST SECTION. 
Parristic ΡΗΙΠΟΒΟΡΗῪ TILL THE Tre oF THE Counci, or Nice. 


§ 76. Among the teachers of the Church who were received as 
immediate disciples of the Apostles, and were called Apostolic Fa- 
thers, Clement of Rome, who was probably the author of the first of 
the two /pistles to the Corinthian Church, which have come down 
to us under his name, and the authors of the “pzsiles ascribed to 
Barnabas, to Ignatius of Antioch, and to Polycarp of Smyrna, as also 
the author of the Epistle to Diognetus, represent Gentile Christianity 
at the time of its development into the early Catholic Church. The 
Shepherd of Hermas bears a very un-Pauline character, and is by no 
means free from Judaizing elements. The work entitled Zestaments 
of the Twelve Patriarchs represents the doctrines of the milder frac- 
tions of Jewish Christians. A Jewish-Christian stand-point is appa- 
rent in the pseudo-Clementine ecognitions and Homilies. In the 
writings of the Apostolic Fathers we see, principally, the fundamental 
doctrines, theoretical and practical, of Christianity being developed 
in the struggle with Judaism and paganism, the distinction between 
Jewish and Gentile Christianity gradually disappearing, and each 





Ate 


πα,» .Ψ 


Ὁ ἐν ee δ ee 





THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. O75 


extreme becoming constantly more and more separated from the 
Church, as the latter becomes united on the basis of the equal author- 
ity of all the Apostles (including Paul). 


Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, ed. Cotelier, Paris, 1672, ed. II., ed. Clericus, Amsterdam, 1724, since 
reproduced by Gallandius and by Migne; ed. Car. Jos. Hetele, Tiibingen, 1839, etc.; ed. Albert Dressel, 
Leips. 1857, 2d ed., 1868. Novum Testamentum extra Canonem receptum (Ὁ Clem. Rom. Epist., 2. Bar- 
nabas, 3 Hermas, 4. Librorum Deperd. Fragmenta: Ev. sec, Hebr., sec. Petrum, sec. Aegyptios, Mat- 
thiae tradit., Petri et Pauli praedicationis et actwum, Petri apocalypseos, etc., quae supersunt), ed. Ad. 
Hilgenfeld, Leips. 1866. Clementis Romani quae feruntur Homiliae. Textum recognovit, versionem 
lat. Cotelerii repet. pass. emend., selectas Cotelerii, Davisii, Clerici atque suas annotationes addidit 
Albertus Schwegler, Stuttgart, 1847. Clem. Rom. quae feruntur Homiliae viginti nunc primum inte- 
grae, ed. Dressel, Gott. 1853. Clementina, ed. Paul de Lagarde, Leipsic, 1865. S. Ignatii quae feruntur 
Epist. una cum ejusdem Martyrio, ed. Jul. Petermann, Leipsic, 1849. Cf. Rich. Rothe, Ueber die 
Eehtheit der ignatianischen Briefe, in the Supplement to his work on the Beginnings of the Christian 
Church, Vol. I., Wittenberg, 1837; Ad. Schliemann, Die Clementinen, Hamburg, 1844; Ad. Hilgenfeld, Die 
Clementinischen Recognitionen und Homilien, Jena, 1848, and Die apost. Vater, Halle, 1853; G. Uhlhorn, 
Die Hom. u. Recogn. des Clemens Romanus, Gortiness, 1854; also Bunsen’s, Baur’s, Alb. Ritschl’s, Volk- 
mar’s and others’ investigations. 


The “ Apostolic Fathers” begin the list of ‘Church Fathers” in the wider signification ἡ 
of this expression, ὦ. 6., of those ecclesiastical writers who, next to Christ and the Apostles, 
were most influential in establishing the doctrine and constitution of the Church. (The 
expression is founded on 1 Cor. iv. 15.) As ‘Church Fathers” in the narrower sense, the 
Catholic Church recognizes only those whom she has approved as such on account of the 
pre-eminent purity in which they preserved the faith of the Church, the erudition with 
which they defended and established the faith, the holiness of their lives, and their (rela- 
tive) antiquity. In respect of time, three periods are generally assumed in the list of 
Church Fathers, the first extending to the end of the third century, the second to the end 
of the sixth century (or, more exactly, to the year 604, in which Gregory the Great died, 
and in the Grecian Church perhaps to the time of John of Damascus), and the third either 
extending to the thirteenth century or limited only by the duration of the Church itself. 
Among its ‘‘ Fathers” the Catholic Church has especially distinguished with the name of | 
Doctores Iicclesiae, in the Eastern Church the following: Athanasius, Basil the Great, 
Gregory of Nazianzen, and Chrysostom, and also John of Damascus; and in the Western 
Church (by a decree of Pope Boniface VIII. in the year 1298): Ambrosius, Hieronymus, 
Augustine, Gregory the Great; at subsequent epochs, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura; 
and finally Saint Bernard and Hilarius of Poitiers were raised by Papal bulls to the rank | 
of Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Those men who do not fully meet the require- 
ments of the above criteria (and especially that of orthodoxy) are called, not Patres, but 
simply Scriptores Ecclesiastict. Among these are Papias, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, 
Tertullian, Eusebius of Czesarea, and others. 

In regard to the person of Clement of Rome (who must be distinguished not only from 
Clement of Alexandria, but perhaps also from the Clement of Philippi, mentioned in Phil. 
iv. 3, with whom Origen, Eusebius, Hieronymus, and others identify him) accounts are con- 
tradictory. According to the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Clement was the son of a well- 
born Roman named Faustinianus; that he might become acquainted with the Christian doc- 
trine, he made a journey to Czesarea in Palestine, where he found Peter, and was instructed 
by him in the principles of Christianity. According to the spurious Epistle of Clemens to 
the Apostle James, Peter chose him as his successor in the chair of the Roman Bishop. Ac- 
cording to Tertullian, he was the immediate successor of Peter in that office; according to 


276 THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 


Trenzus, Eusebius, Hieronymus, and others, he was the fourth Roman Bishop, Linus and 
Anicetus having occupied that office between Peter and himself. Husebius and Hierony- 
mus represent him as at the head of the Roman Church from a. p. 92 to 100. With the 
Flavius Clemens, of consular rank, who was executed under Domitian in the year 95 as a 
Judaizing atheist (probably, therefore, as a Christian), tradition has not identified him. <A 
division, which had arisen in the Church at Corinth (in. the time of Domitian, according 
to that Hegesippus who lived in the middle of the second century, see Kuseb., EZ. 11. 
III, 16), is represented as the occasion of the letter, written in the name of the Roman 
Church, which has come down to us as the first (probably genuine, though revised, yet in 
Volkmar’s opinion spurious) Epistle of Clemens (composed about A. D. 125). The ideas 
expressed by Clemens are those contained in the Pauline Epistles and in the Epistle to 
the Hebrews. We are made righteous, he says, not by ourselves, nor by our wisdom, 
knowledge, piety, or works, but by faith. But we are not for that reason to be slow to 
good works, nor to abate our love, but we must accomplish every good work with joyful 
zeal, just as God himself, the Creator, rejoices in his works. Where love reigns, no divi- 
sions can continue to exist. Have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit of grace, 
which 1s poured out upon us, and is there not one calling in Christ? Christ was sent by 
God, and the Apostles were sent by Christ; filled with the Holy Ghost by the resurrection 
of Christ, they proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God, and ordained the first be- 
lievers as overseers and ministers (ἐπισκόπους καὶ διακόνους, cf. Phil. i. 1) of the rest. To 
the overseers we owe obedience; to those who are most aged, reverence. Clemens 
defends the incipient Christian hierarchy by pointing to the orders of the Old Testament, 
the symbolical understanding of which he calls γνῶσις (cf. 1 Cor. xii. 8; Heb. v. and vi.). 
He seeks to silence the doubt of many as to the second coming of Christ and the resurrec- 
tion, by adducing natural analogies, such as the succession of day and night, the growth 
of the seed sown in the earth, and the (supposed) revivification of the bird Phoenix. The 
second Fpistle, in which teachers are admonished to walk worthily of their vocation, as 
also the Epistles to Virgins (ascetics of both sexes), which Wettstein first discovered in a 
Syriac version, and published in 1752, are probably spurious. The Apostolic Constitutions 
and Canons, which were ascribed to Clemens Romanus, date in their present form from 
the third and fourth centuries after Christ, though some parts are older. 

The so-called Recognitions and Homilies of Clemens were composed under his name by 
Jewish Christians. The Recognitions, founded on an older Judaizing work, the “ Kerygma 
of Peter,” and written about 140 or 150 A. D., though in their present form probably of 
later date, combat Gnosticism, as represented by Simon the Magian, and defend the iden- 
tity of the Creator of the world with the only true God; but they distinguish from Him 
(after the manner of Philo) the Spirit, as the organ through which he created, the Only- 
begotten, of whom he himself is the head. The true worshiper of God is he who does 
His will and observes the precepts of the law. To seek after righteousness and the king- 
dom of God is the way in which to arrive in the future world at the direct vision of the 
secrets of God. The written law cannot be rightly understood without the aid of tradi- 
tion, which, starting from Christ, the true prophet, is carried forward by the Apostles 
and teachers. The essential part of the law is contained in the ten commandments. The 
Mosaic institution of offerings had only a provisional significance; in its place Christ has 
instituted the ordinance of baptism. For the non-Jews who believe in Christ those com- 
mands are bmding which were laid on the proselytes of the gate. The Jews must believe 
in Christ, and the Gentile who believes in Christ must fulfill the law in its essential and 
permanent requirements (Recogn., 1V. 5: debet is, qui ex gentibus est et ex Deo habet ut dili- 
gat Jesum, proprii habere propositi, ut credat et Moysi; et rursus Hebraeus, qui ex Deo habet, 





4 = 


) 


THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 277 


ut credat Moysi, habere debet et ex proposito suo, ut credat in Jesum). The Homilies, which are 
probably a revision of the Recognitions, made about 170 A. D., represent in general the same 


stand-point with the Recognitions, teaching that the fundamental doctrines of Christ, the 


true prophet, who was God’s Son, but not God, are, that there is one God, who made the 
world, and who, because he is just, will give to every one according to his works; yet they 
contain a greater number of speculative elements than the Recognitions. Their fundamental 
theoretical principle is, that God, the One, has arranged all things according to contraries. 
God stands to his wisdom, the creatress of the All, in the double relation expressed by 
συστολή, in virtue of which he forms with it a unity (μονάς), and ἔκτασις, in virtue of which 
this unity is separated into a duality. The contraries, warm and cold, moist and dry, form 
the basis of the four different elements, into which God divided the originally simple mat- 
ter of which he made the world. Man alone is endowed with freedom of will. The souls 
of the godless are punished with annihilation. The true prophet has appeared at various 
times, under different names and forms, first in Adam, last in Christ. Through Christ the 
Gentiles have become participants in the benefits of the revelation of God. That part of 
the law which he abrogated (in particular, the requirement of offerings) never really be- 
longed to it, but arose from the corruption which the genuine tradition of the revelation 
made to Moses underwent on the occasion of its being written down in the books of the 
Old Testament. He who believes in but one of the revelations of God is well-pleasing to 
God. Christianity is the universal form of Judaism. When he who was born a Gentile 
fulfills the law in the fear of God, he is a Jew, otherwise he is a Gentile ((EAAqv).—The 
chronological relation between the Recognitions and the Homilies is a matter of dispute. 
Uhlhorn, among others, holds the Homilies to be the earlier work, Hilgenfeld, the Recogni- 
tions; the former is supported by F. Nitzsch, among others, in his History of Dogmas, I. 
49; but Nitzsch admits that, in the Recognitions (composed at Rome), certain parts of the 
traditional material common to both works appear in a simpler and more primitive form 
than in the Homilies. There exists also an Epitome of the Homilies, which has been several 
times edited (most recently by A. Dressel, Leips. 1859). 

The work entitled ‘ Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” which may here be mentioned 
with this pseudonymous literature, was probably written near the middle of the second 
century. Its author belonged to that Jewish-Christian party which did not demand that 
the Gentile Christians should be circumcised. In it the Epistles of Paul and also the Acts 
of the Apostles are reckoned among the Holy Scriptures. It teaches that the high- 
priesthood of Christ completed and replaced the Levitical service of the temple; that the 
Spirit of God descended on Jesus at his baptism, and wrought in him holiness, righteous- 
ness, knowledge, and sinlessness; that the Israelites who were scattered abroad are to be 
gathered together and converted to Christ, and that the fear of God, with prayer and 
fasting, is a shield against temptation, and gives strength for the fulfillment of the divine 
commands. 

The work entitled “ The Shepherd,” purports to have been written in the time of 
Bishop Clement. It was probably composed about the year 130, and is ascribed to one 
Hermas, who is described in the Muratori-Fragment as the brother of Pius, the Bishop of 
Rome from 140 to 152. In any case, it cannot have been the work of the Hermas in 
Romans xvi. 14. The work contains a narrative of visions vouchsafed to Hermas. A 
guardian spirit in shepherd's clothing, sent by an adorable angel, communicates to him 
certain commandments for himself and his Church, and interprets parables for him. The 
purport of the commandments is that they to whom they are addressed should believe in 
God and walk τῇ the fear of Him. The Old Testament law is not mentioned, but the pre- 
cepts which are given respecting abstinence, fasting, etc., betray simply the legal stand- 


278 THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 


point, and even the doctrine of supererogatory works is put forward. After baptism a 
second opportunity is allowed for repentance. Christ is styled the first-created angel, who 
was from the beginning only the organ of the Holy Ghost. God is compared to the master 
of a house, the Holy Ghost to his son, and Christ to the most faithful of his servants. 
Hermas, having acquired perfection through repentance and good works, is surrounded by 
twelve ministering virgins, who represent the various powers of the Holy Ghost. He is 
made a building-stone in the edifice of the Church. 

The date of the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, is, according to Hilgenfeld (Das Urchris- 
tenthum, p. 77, and Nov. Test. extra Can. rec., I1., p. xiii.), A. D. 96 or 97. Volkmar, reason- 
ing from the passage in ch. 16, on the restoration of the temple by the aid of the Romans, 
concludes with greater probability that it was written in 118-119, by some one who was 
not a Jew but who was familiar with the Alexandrian philosophy (ch. 16: ἣν ἡμῶν τὸ 
κατοικητήριον τῆς καρδίας πλῆρες εἰδωλολατρείας), and whose intention was perhaps to write 
in the name and according to the doctrine of Barnabas, as of one whose doctrine was the 
same with Paul’s. But where Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews recognize 
two covenants, objectively distinct (the παλαιὰ and the καινὴ διαθήκη), the author of the 
Epistle of Barnabas sees rather only a subjective difference between successive modes of 
apprehending the divine revelation. The Jews, he says, through their devotion to the 
letter, failed to perceive the true sense of God’s covenant-agreement with them and by 
their sins forfeited salvation; for this they were reproved by the prophets, who taught 
that obedience was better than sacrifice; the Christians have entered into the inheritance 
originally intended for the Jews and have become the true covenant people; their work is 
to fear God and keep his commandments, not the ceremonial law, but the new law of 
Jesus Christ (nova lex Jesu Christi), which requires the self-consecration of man to God 
(ef. Rom. xii. 1), and does not impose a yoke of bondage (ef. Gal. ν. 1). Insight into the 
true sense of Scripture, attained by the aid of the allegorical method of interpretation, is 
termed, in the Epistle of Barnabas, γνῶσις, knowledge (cf. 1 Cor. xii. 1 seq.; Hebr. v. vi.), 
which is related to faith (πίστις) as higher to lower. Yet no aristocratic separation from 
the church is to be allowed on the part of those who have risen to this higher attain- 
ment (cf. Hebr. x. 25). The (Judaistic) opinion, that the Testament of the Jews, as under- 
stood by them, is also of authority for Christians, is denounced by the author of the Epistle 
of Barnabas, as a very great error; he warns: ἵνα μὴ προσερχώμεθα ὡς ἐπηλύται TO 
ἐκείνων νόμῳ (ut non incurramus tanquam proselyti ad illorum legem, ch. 3; ne similetis dis, 
qui peccata sua congerunt et dicunt: quia testamentum illorum et nostrum est, ch. 4). (The 
Codex Siaaiticus, discovered by Tischendorf, gives the original Greek of the first four 
chapters, which were before known only in a Latin translation; reprinted in Dressel’s 
Patr. Apost., 2d edition, 1863; cf. Weizsacker, Zur Kritik des Barnabasbriefs, aus dem Codex 
Sinaiticus, Tubingen Univ. Programm, 1863). 

The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians, which was written between 147 and 167, and 
perhaps in the year 150, is probably for the most part genuine; but there are so many 
grounds for suspecting the authenticity of the Epistles ascribed to Ignatius of Antioch 
(who was torn in pieces by leopards as a despiser of the gods, on the 20th of December, 
A. D. 115, not at Rome, as we have almost conclusive reason for believing, but at Antioch, 
soon after the earthquake at Antioch, which took place during Trajan’s sojourn in that city ; 
ef. G. Volkmar, in the Rhein. Museum, new series, XII., 1857, pp. 481-511), or for supposing 
that extensive interpolations were made in them at various times, that they cannot be confi- 
dently relied on as documents exponential of the development of religious thought in the 
post-apostolic age. An Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians is mentioned by Irenzeus 
(Adv. Haer., 111. 3); but with that one the Epistle now extant is only partially identical. 





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THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 279 


Whether the brief Syriac recension (found in an Egyptian cloister, and first published by 
W. Cureton at London, in 1845) of the three Epistles of Ignatius to the Ephesians, to the 
Romans, and to Polycarp, contains the earlier text, or is an abridgment of the Greek text, 
is uncertain; though the former supposition is the more probable. The character of these 
Epistles is Pauline, and in the case of those of Ignatius, partly Johannean. But the 
hierarchical tendency is visible in all of them, especially in the Epistles of Ignatius. Poly- 
carp (died 167) admonishes those to whom his Epistle is addressed (ch. 5), to be obedient 
to their presbyters and deacons, as to God and Christ, and the Epistles of Ignatius contain 
the basis of a hierarchical system. The Ignatian Epistles, especially that addressed to 
the Romans, breathe forth love for martyrdom, which the author represents as shortly 
awaiting himself. In the later ones, the hierarchical tendency becomes constantly more 
prominent. Nothing but steadfast loyalty to God, Christ, the bishop, and the command- 
ments of the apostles can protect one from the temptations of the heretics, who mix Jesus 
Christ with poison (Ad Trallianos, ch. 1 seq.). In the Epistles to the Ephesians, to the 
Trallians, and to the Smyrneans, it is chiefly the Docetes, and in the Epistles to the 
Magnesians and Philadelphians it is the Judaizing Christians, who are combated. Cf. 
Bunsen’s Die drei echten und die vier unechten Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochien, Hamburg, 
1847; Ignatius von Antiochien u. s. Zeit, ibid. 1847; Baur’s Untersuchungen iiber die ign. 
Briefe, Tiabingen, 1848; cf. also the investigations of Uhlhorn, Hilgenfeld and others 
(according to whom, the Syriac text is an abridgment of the Greek), Friedr. Bohringer 
(Kirchengesch. der drei ersten Jahriunderte, 2d edition, Zirich, 1861, pp. 1-46), who gives an 
exact analysis of the Epistles, Richard Adalbert Lipsius (Ueber das Verhiliniss des Textes 
der drei syrischen Briefe des Ignatius zu den tibrigen Recensionen der Ignatianischen Literatur, 
Leipsic, 1859; also in Abh. fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes, published by the Deutsche mor- 
genlind. Gesellschaft, and edited by Herm. Brockhaus, Leipsic, 1859 and 61, where Lipsius 
argues in favor of the priority of the Syriac recension), and further (for the opposite 
view), A. Merx’s Meletemata Ignatiana (Halle, 1861). According to Volkmar, the three first 
Martyr-Epistles were composed in about 170, the next four about 175-180, at which time 
he judges that the spurious passages were added to the genuine Epistle of Polycarp. 

The (anonymous) Epistle to Diognetus (who was probably the favorite of Marcus Aure- 
lius, mentioned by Capitolinus, Vit. Ant., ch. 4) is included, sometimes among the writings 
of Justin, sometimes among those of the Apostolic Fathers, although in style and dogmatic 
stand-point it differs materially from the works of Justin (see Semisch, Justia, I. p. 178 
seq.). Its composition by an immediate disciple of the Apostles is by no means certain, 
since the author seems rather to appeal to the Catholic principle of the “traditio aposto- 
lorum.” The Epistle contains a spirited Christian apology. (It has been published by 
Otto with the works of Justin, see below, § 78, and separately by W. A. Hollenberg, Ber- 
lin, 1853.) Its stand-point is akin to that of the Johannean Epistles and the fourth Gospel. 
Judaism is rejected. To pretend to find in circumcision an evidence of one’s election and 
of God’s especial favor, is treated by the author as a boastful assumption, deserving to be 
met with scorn. He considers the sacrificial cultus to be an error, and anxious strictness 
in the choice of meats and in the solemnization of the Sabbath to be without reason. Yet 
he is no less decided in his opposition to paganism. The Greek gods are for him inanimate 
images of wood, clay, stone, and metal, and the worship offered to them is senseless. In 
the ages before Christ God had left man subject to the disorderly play of his sensuous 
desires, in order to show that it is not by human strength and merit, but simply through 
the mercy of God, that eternal life can be attaimed. The moral superiority of the Chris- 
tians is portrayed by the author in glowing colors. Their manner of life, he says, is most 
admirable and excellent. They dwell as strangers in their native lands. They perform all 


280 GNOSTICISM. 


duties like citizens, and endure all that is inflicted upon them, as if they were foreigners 
Every land, however foreign, is fatherland for them, and every fatherland is foreign. 
They marry, like all men, and beget children, but they do not expose those whom 
they have begotten. They have their meals, but not their wives, in common. They 
are on the earth, but their life is in heaven. They love all men, and are persecuted by 
all. They are not known, and yet are condemned. They are killed, and yet live. They 
are poor, yet make many rich. What the soul is in the body, that are the Christians in 
the world. That which produces in them this manner of life is the love of God, which has 
been manifested in the sending of the Logos, who formed the world, and is ever being 
born anew in the hearts of the saints (πάντοτε νέος ἐν ἁγίων καρδίαις γεννώμενος). 


§ 77. The so-called Gnostics, in their endeavor to advance from 
Christian faith to Christian knowledge, made the first attempt to 
construct a religious philosophy on the Christian basis. The Gnostic 
speculation was less logical than imaginative, the various abstract 
elements of religious belief being realized in the form of personal 
beings, forming a Christian or rather a semi-Christian mythology, 
underneath which lay hidden the germs of a correct historical and 
scientific appreciation of Christianity. In this latter regard the first 
problem in importance was the relation of Christianity to Judaism, 
and this problem was solved by the Gnostics by translating into its 
equivalent theoretical expression the practical attitude assumed by 
the ultra-Paulinists with reference to Judaism. The next problem 
was the relation of Christianity to the various heathen and, in par- 
ticular, to the Hellenic religions. The ideas of the Gnostics were 
partly those of the Old Testament and of Christianity, and in part 
Hellenic and pagan. It is with reference to these problems and this 
range of ideas that we must distinguish the separate stadia and forms 
of Gnosticism, which from simple beginnings resulted in very com- 
plicated systems. Christianity was removed from Judaism by a con- 
stantly-increasing interval in the doctrines of Cerinthus, Cerdo, Satur- 
ninus, and Marcion, of whom the three former distinguished the God 
ot Moses and of the prophets from God, the Father of Jesus Christ, 
while Marcion, an enemy to all external legality, assigned to Chris- 
tianity, as the one absolutely independent, unconditional, and abso- 
lute religion, a position of complete isolation from the Old Testament 
revelation, the author of which was, in his opinion, merely a just but 
not a good being. The speculations of Carpocrates, a Christian Pla- 
tonist and Universalist, of the Ophites or Naasenes and Perates, who 
saw in the Serpent a wise and good being, and of Basilides the Syrian 
and Valentinus and his followers, concerned in part the relation of 





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GNOSTICISM. 281 


paganism to Christianity, and were more or less pervaded by pagan 
ideas. Basilides the Syrian taught that the highest of the divine 
potencies were located in a supra-mundane space, that the God wor- 
shiped by the Jews was a being of limited power, but that those whe 
believed in Christ were illuminated and converted by a gospel, of 
which the trve and supreme God was the author. The Gnosticism | 
of Valentinus and his numerous followers, on the other hand, was in 
essential particulars affected by Parsee influences. According to 
this systema, there emanated first from the original Being, or Father, 
a number cf divine, supra-mundane ons, constituting the “ full- 
ness” {Picyoma) of the divine life. Wisdom (Sophia), the last of 
these Avoas, through its unregulated yearning after the original 
Father, became subject to the law of effort and suffering, and gave 
dirth to an inferior Wisdom, represented as tarrying in a region — 
outside of the “ Pleroma” and named Achamoth; she also brought 
forth the psychical and material realms, together with the Demiurge. 
The Valentinians taught, further, that three redemptive works were 
wrought, the first in the world of A‘ons, by Christ, the second in 
the case of Achamoth, by a Jesus who was produced by the AZons, 
and the third on earth, by Mary’s Son Jesus, in whom dwelt the 
Holy Ghost or the divine wisdom. Bardesanes, the Syrian, simplified 
the doctrines of Gnosticism. He taught that man’s superiority con- 
sisted in the freedom of his will. The Dualism of Mani was a 
combination of Magianistn and Christianity, for which Gnostic spec- 
ulations furnished the connecting link. 


The sources from which our knowledge of Gnosticism is derived are—if we except the Gnostic work: 
Pistis Sophia (e cod. Coptico descr. lat. vertit M. G. Schwartze, ed. J. H. Peterman, Berlin, 1851) and 
several fragments—exclusively the works of its opponents, especially Irenwus’ ἔλεγχος τῆς Ψευδωνύμου 
γνώσεως (ed. Stieren, Leips. 1853; Vol. I, pp. 901-971: Gnosticorwn, quorum meminit Irenaeus, frag- 
menta) and Pseudo-Origines’ (Hippolytus’) ἔλεγχος κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων (pr. ed. Emm. Miller, Oxford 
1851), the works of Pseudo-Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian, Clement of Alex, Origen, Eusebius, Philastrins, 
Epiphanius, Theodoret, Augustine, and others, and the treatise of Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist, against the 
Gnostics, Ennead., 11. 9. Of modern writers on this subject, the following may be mentioned: Neander, 
Genet. Entw. der vornehmsten gnostischen Systeme, Berlin, 1818 (cf. Kirchengesch., I. 2, 2d ed., p. 681 
seq.); J. Matter, Hist. crit. dw Gnosticisme, 1828, 2d ed., 1843; Mohler, Ursprung des Gnosticismus, Ttib. 
1831; Ferd. Chr. Baur, De gnosticorwm christianismo ideali, ΤΌ. 1827; Die christl. Gnosis oder Reli- 
gionsphilosophie, Tab. 1835; Das Christenthwm der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 2d ed., Tiib. 1860, pp. 
175-234; J. Hildebrandt, Philosophiae gnosticae origines, Berlin, 1839; J. L. Jacobi, in Herzog’s Real- 
encye. fiir Theol. und Kirche, Vol. V., Stuttg. and Hamb. 1856; R. A. Lipsius, in Ersch und Gruber’s 
Eneycl., 1. ΤΊ. publ. sep., Leips. 1860, and in many portions of his work entitled: Zur Quellenkrit. des 
Epiph., Vienna, 1865; Wilh. MGller, Gesch. der Kosmologie in der griech. Kirche bis auf Origenes, Halle, 
1860, pp. 189-473; Hilgenfeld, Der Gnosticismus und die Philosophumena, in the Ztschr. fiir wiss. Theo- 
togie, V., Halle, 1862, pp. 400-464. In Bunsen’s Analecta Ante-Nicaena, 8 vols., London, 1854, may be 
found the extracts made by Clement of Alexandria from the works of Theodotus the Valentinian, edited by 
Jac. Bernays (Vol. I., pp. 205-273). [A clear and full view of Gnosticism and its several schools is present 
ed in Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. I., pp. 221-251.—Tr.] 


282 GNOSTICISM. 


‘Gnosticism was the first comprehensive attempt to construct a philosophy of Chris. 
tianity; owing, however, to the immense reach of the speculative ideas which pressed 
themselves on the attention of the Gnostics, but with which they were wholly lacking in 
scientific ability to cope, this attempt ended only in mysticism, theosophy, mythology, in 
short, in a thoroughly unphilosophical system” (Lipsius, in the Encycl. der Wissensch. und 
Kiinste, ed. Ersch. and Gruber, I. 71, Leipsic, 1860, p. 269). The classification of the forms 
of Gnosticism must (in agreement with Baur, Das Christenthum der drei ersten Jahrh., 
p. 225, though not altogether in the manner adopted by him) be founded on the religions 
whose various elements affected the content of Gnosticism. 

The conception of γνῶσις, in the wider sense of religious knowledge, is older than the 
development of the systems of Gnosticism. The allegorical interpretation of the Holy 
Scriptures by the Jews who were educated at Alexandria was in substance Gnosis. In 
Matt. xiii. 11, Christ after having spoken to the multitude in parables, interprets what he 
had been saying to his disciples, since to them was given the ability, denied to the multi- 
tude, of knowing (γνῶναι) the mysteries of the kingdom of God. Paul (1 Cor. i. 4, 5) 
thanks God that the Corinthians are rich “in all utterance and all knowledge’ (γνώσει); 
the rational view of the use of meats offered to idols he terms Gnosis (1 Cor. viii. 1 seq.), 
and among the gifts of the Spirit he mentions (1 Cor. xii. 8) the “word of wisdom” and 
the “word of knowledge” (λόγος γνώσεως) as distinct from faith (xioT~¢)—where the word 
γνῶσις seems, like the expression ‘strong meat” (στερεὰ τροφή) in the Epistle to the He- 
brews (v. 14), to refer especially to the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures (cf. 
1 Cor. x. 1-12; Gal. iv. 21-31).* In Rev. ii, 24, a “knowledge of the depths of Satan” 
is spoken of, probably in opposition to some who laid claim to a knowledge of the 
depths of the Godhead. Both Jewish Christians (as, for example, the author of the 
Clementines) and Gentile Christians, orthodox as well as heterodox, appropriated and 
started from the primitive Christian conception of γνῶσις, in their attempts to increase 
the depths of their Christian knowledge; the Alexandrian Church Fathers, in particular, 
laid great stress on the distinction between faith and knowledge (γνῶσις). The author 
of the Epistle of Barnabas seeks to instruct his readers, to the end ‘‘that with their 
faith they may also have perfect knowledge ” (iva μετὰ τῆς πίστεως τελείαν ἔχητε καὶ THY 
γνῶσιν), and by this ‘‘ knowledge” is meant an acquaintance with the typical or allegorical 
sense of the Mosaic ceremonial law. But those who first extended the allegorical method 
of interpretation to the books of the New Testament were men who sought (either con- 
sciously or unconsciously) to pass beyond the sphere of ideas contained in them; this 
extension of the principle of allegorical interpretation appeared first among the heretical 
Gnostics and especially among the Valentinians, but was afterward also accepted by the 
Alexandrian members of the Church and others. Of the various sects which are usually 
comprehended under the name of Gnostics, it is reported (Hippol., Philos., V. 6, and 
Epiphan., Haeres., 26) that the Ophites or Naasenes, in particular, gave themselves this 
name (φάσκοντες μόνοι τὰ βάθη γιγνώσκειν). 

The idea that Judaism was but a preparation for Christianity was expressed in the 
doctrine of Cerinthus (K#pioc)—who lived in Asia Minor ca, 115 A. D., and was perhaps 
educated at Alexandria (Philos., VII. 33: Αἰγυπτίων παιδείᾳ aoxneic)—in the form of a 
distinction between the God worshiped by the Jews and who created the world, and 


* [But allegorical interpretation, provided it rests on a rational principle, is not gnostic. Much less 
does it follow that the words γνῶσις, γνῶναι, when used in the New Testament in contrast with faith, as 
meaning explanation or rational interpretation, lent any sanction to the gnostic tendencies against which, 
in their germinant beginnings, the apostolic teachings and warnings are distinct and earnest (Col, ii. 18; 
1 Tim. i. 4; Tit. iii, 9; 1 John ivy. 3; Jude 4 seq.)}—-Hd.] 














GNOSTICISM. 283 


the supreme and true God. The latter, according to Cerinthus, caused the Aon Christ to 
descend on Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph and Mary, at his baptism; this Alon 
Christ proclaimed through Jesus the true God, but left Jesus before his death and had no 
part in his passion (Jren., I. 26; Hippol., Philos., VII. 33). In Epiphan., Haeres., 28, a par- 
tial leaning toward Judaism (προσέχειν τῷ ᾿Τουδαϊσμῷ ἀπὸ μέρους) is ascribed to Cerinthus 
and his followers. By this it is scarcely probable that we are to understand that, the doc- 
trines of the Church having already been brought to a relatively advanced stage of de- 
velopment, a regressive Judaizing movement was begun in the doctrine of Cerinthus (a mis- 
apprehension into which early historians fell, for reasons easily understood), but simply 
that in his doctrine vestiges were visible of the original intimate union of Christianity with 
Judaism ; the theosophy of Cerinthus shows throughout a very decided tendency to pass 
over all the barriers of Judaism. Cerinthus must have been influenced in his doctrine by 
the Pauline doctrine of the law as a preparation for Christianity, a παιδαγωγὸς εἰς Χριστόν, 
and by such ideas as prevail in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Employing the Philonic dis- 
tinction between God and His world-creating power, he went on to define the difference 
between Judaism and Christianity as arising from the non-identity of the divine beings 
worshiped by each. 

The Nicolaitans, mentioned in the Revelation of John, are described by Irenzeus (III. 
11) as forerunners of Cerinthus. Such they may have been, in so far as they, carrying out 
to its logical conclusion the Pauline principle that the law was made void through faith, 
objected to the imposition on themselves of the laws which were ordained for the Prose- 
lytes of the Gate, and which, according to the conciliatory proposition reported in the Acts 
of the Apostles, were to be observed by the Gentile Christians. As the Book of Revela- 
tion is opposed to the Nicolaitans, so, according to Irenzeus (III. 11), the Gospel of John 
was directed against the doctrine of Cerinthus; this statement contains in so far an ele- 
ment of truth, as it is true that the Gospel in question (which may have been written 
about 100 A. D., before the time of Cerinthus), in teaching that the world was created by 
God’s Logos, opposes the doctrine that the world-creating God of the Jews was other 
than the true and supreme God,—a doctrine maintained by Cerinthus, but afterward far 
more completely developed by. other Gnostics. 

It is quite uncertain with how much reason the beginnings of heretical Gnosis have 
been ascribed to Simon Magus (mentioned in Acts viii. 9-24). Simon is said to have pre- 
tended that he was a manifestation of God, and that Helena, whom he took about with 
him, was an incarnation of the divine reason (Justin, Apol., I. 26, 56; Iren., I. 23) But 
much has been unhistorically ascribed to him which belongs either to Paul or to later indi- 
viduals. There existed a sect of Simonians (Iren., I. 23). The most important disciple of 
Simon is said to have been Menander of Samaria (Iren., I. 23), under whose influence 
Saturninus of Antioch and Basilides are reported to have stood (Iren., I. 24). The doc- 
trine of Cerdo is said to have been connected with that of Simon and the Nicolaitans 
(iments 21: Philos., Vil. 37). 

Saturninus of Antioch, who lived in the reign of Hadrian, taught (according to Iren., 
I. 24; Philos., VII. 28) that there existed an unknowable God, the Father, who had created 
the angels, archangels, and various other forces and powers; that the world, including 
man, was created by seven angels, and that the superior power, in whose likeness man 
was formed, communicated to the latter a spark of life, which after death returned to its 
source, while the body was resolved into its original elements. The Father, he taught, 
was without origin, bodiless, and formless, and had never in reality appeared to men; the 
God of the Jews was only an angel. Christ came to abolish the power of the God of the 
Jews, to save the believing and the good, and to condemn the wicked and the demons: 


984 GNOSTICISM. 


Marriage and procreation were the works of Satan. All prophecies were inspired cither 
by the angels who made the world or by Satan, who worked in opposition to those angels 
and especially in opposition to the God of the Jews. 

Cerdo, a Syrian, came (according to the testimony of Irenzeus, I. 27.1 and 111. 4. 3) te 
Rome while Hyginus (the successor of Telesphorus and predecessor of Pius) was Bishop, 
hence shortly before 140. He, like Cerinthus, distinguished between the God of Moses 
and the prophets and God the Father of Jesus Christ; the former could be known, the 
latter could not be known; the former was just, but the latter was good (Iren., I. 27; 
Hippol., Philos., VII. 31). 

Marcion of Pontus taught (according to Iren., III. 4.3) at Rome after Cerdo, in the 
time of Bishop Anicetus (the successor of Pius and predecessor of Soter), hence about 160 
A.D. He had previously taught at Sinope about the year 138, and in 140 was excommu- 
nicated at the same place. In ethical respects he maintained, as an Antinomian, an ex- 
treme Paulinism. Of the Gospels, he accepted only the Gospel of Luke, in a revised form 
adapted to his own stand-point. After giving himself up to Gnostic speculations, he car- 
ried to an extreme before unknown those theoretical fictions, in which the practical attitude 
assumed by his party with reference to the Jewish law, had found a fantastic theological 
expression. Not content simply to distinguish the Creator of the world, whom the Jews 
worshiped, from the supreme God, and to declare the former inferior in rank to the latter, 
he affirmed (judging certain statements of the Old Testament from the stand-point of his 
own Christian consciousness, and thus rejecting the method of allegorical interpretation) 
that the God of the Jews, though just (in the sense of one who, in executing the law, 
spares no one), was not good, since he was the author of evil works, and was bloodthirsty, 
changeable, and full of contradictions. In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, 
Jesus, he taught, was sent by the Father, the supreme God, in human form to Judea, to 
abrogate the law and the prophets and all the works of the God who created and ruled 
the world (the κοσμοκράτωρ). Itis a part of our struggle against the Creator of the world 
that we abstain from marriage (Clem. Alex., Strom., III. 3, 4). Only the soul can attain 
to eternal blessedness; the earthly body cannot survive death (Iren., I. 27; Hippol., 
Philos., VII. 29). That the Marcionites regarded light and darkness as eternal principles, 
and Jesus as a third being reconciling their antagonism, and that they also distinguished 
the “Creator of the world” from the “God of Light,” and preached asceticism as an aid 
in the contest with evil, are affirmations contained in the Fihrist (see Fligel, Mani, Leipsic, 
1862, p. 159 seq.). Cf. Lipsius, Die Zeit des Marcion und des Herakleon, in the Ztschr. ee 
wiss. Theol., X., 1867, pp. 75-83. 

In direct contrast to this anti-Judaistic tendency was the ethical and philosophical Ju- 
daism of the Clementina (see above, § 76), which opposed strenuously the distinction of 
the highest God from the Creator of the world. 

In distinguishing the highest God, from whom Christ descended, from the Demiurge 
and Lawgiver, Carpocrates, Basilides, Valentinus, and others, agreed with the Gnostics 
thus far named; but their doctrines betrayed to a more considerable extent the influence 
of Hellenic speculation. These Gnostics treated, in part, expressly of the relation of 
Paganism to Christianity. Valentinus and, to a much greater extent, Mani transplanted 
Parsee conceptions into the field of Christianity. 

Carpocrates of Alexandria—among whose followers was one named Marcellina, who 
came to Rome during the bishopric of Anicetus (about 160 A. D. )—taught perhaps as early 
as the year 130, and maintained a species of universalistic rationalism. His followers kept 
before them images of the persons to whom they paid the greatest reverence, among 
whom were included not only Jesus and Paul, but also Homer, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and 





τ 





GNOSTICISM. 285 


others. In regard to the relation of Christianity to Judaism, Carpocrates agreed substan- 
tially with Cerinthus and Cerdo, and more particularly with Saturninus, with whom he 
taught that the world and all that it contains were created by angels far inferior to the 
uncreated Father. With the Ebionites, Carpocrates taught that Jesus was the son of 
Joseph and Mary, but, in opposition to the Ebionites, viewed him not as the perfect Jew, 
on whom, in consideration of his perfect fulfillment of the law, the Messianic dignity had 
been conferred, but, rather, simply as the perfect Man. Carpocrates taught that it was 
because Jesus, in spite of his Jewish education, had the sense to despise Judaism, that he 
became the Redeemer and the Deliverer of man from the sufferings laid upon him for his 
discipline; every soul which, like Jesus, was able to despise the powers which govern the 
world, would receive the same power which he received. In support of this position, Car- 
pocrates made use of dogmas which he undoubtedly borrowed from Platonism. The souls 
of men existed before they descended into their earthly bodies; they, together with the 
unbegotten God, had gazed, while the world revolved, on that which exists eternally be- 
yond the arch of heaven (meaning, evidently, the Ideas, which are represented in the myth 
of the Phaedrus as situated above the heavens); the more energetic and the purer a soul 
is, the better able is it in its earthly existence to recall what it saw in that previous state, 
and he who is able to do this receives from above a power (δύναμις), which renders him 
superior to the powers that rule the world. This “power” passes from the locality be- 
yond the heavens, where God is, through the planetary spheres and the world-ruling 
potencies that inhabit them, and strives, freed from their influence, to reach those souls 
which are like itself, as the soul of Jesus was. He who has lived in perfect purity, 
unspotted by transgression, goes after death to God, but all other souls must expiate their 
crimes by passing successively into various bodies. At last, after sufficient atonement has 
been made, all are saved and live in communion with God, the Lord of the angels, who 
made the world. Jesus had a special, secret doctrine for those who were worthy of it and 
obedient. Man is saved through faith and love; every work is, as such, indifferent, and 
is only good or bad in human opinion. The Carpocratians not merely occupied themselves 
with speculation, but practiced a highly-developed cultus peculiar to themselves, which 
their ecclesiastical opponents called magic (Iren., I. 25; Hippol., Philos, VII. 32; by this 
latter reference the inaccuracies of the Latin text of Irenaeus and the misapprehensions of 
Epiphanius, Haeres., 27, which many in modern times have shared in, are to be corrected ; 
ef. Theodoret, Haer. Fab., I. 5). Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, carrying his father’s 
principle to the extreme, and influenced probably by the doctrines of Plato’s Republic, 
maintained an anarchical communism (Clem., Strom., III. 2). 

The Naassenes or Ophites, who called themselves Gnostics, taught that the beginning 
of perfection was the knowledge of man, and its end the knowledge of God (ἀρχὴ τελειώ- 
σεως γνῶσις ἀνθρώπου, θεοῦ δὲ γνῶσις ἀπηρτισμένη τελείωσις, Hippol., Philos, V. 6). The 
first man, Adam, was, according to them, androgynous (ἀρσενόθηλυς), uniting in himself the 
spiritual, the psychical, and the material (τὸ νοερόν, τὸ ψυ χικόν, τὸ χοϊκόν), and the same 
character descended on Jesus, the son of Mary (Hippol., Philos., V. 6). Embracing the prin- 
ciple of tradition, these Gnostics traced their doctrine back to James, the brother of the Lord 
(ibid., ch.1). Irenzeus and Epiphanius ascribe to them a relatively complete system, similar 
to that of the Valentinians; probably this system belonged to the later Ophites. Akin to 
the Ophites in doctrine were the Perates, who asserted that through their knowledge they 
were able to overcome the liability to decay (διελθεῖν καὶ περᾶσαι τὴν φθοράν, Philos., V. 
16). They distinguished three principles: the unbegotten, the self-begotten, and the be- 
gotten Good. All the forces of the terrestrial world, the world of change and development, 
descended from the upper worlds, and so Christ descended from the unbegotten principle, 


286 GNOSTICISM. 


Christ the Saviour, the Son, the Logos, the serpent, who mediates between the motionless 
Father and matter, which 1s subject to motion. The serpent present at the fall of map 
(ὁ σοφὸς τῆς Kiag λόγος), the serpent lifted up by Moses, and Christ, are identical (Philos., 
V. 12 seq.). The Ophitic Systems have been recently reviewed by Lipsius in Hilgenfeld’s 
Zeitschr. fiir wiss. Theologie, 1863 and 1864. Cf. Joh. Nep. Gruber, Ueber die Ophiten, Inau- 
guraldiss., Wurzburg, 1864. On the Perates, ef. Baxmann, Die Philosophumenu und die 
Peraten, nm Niedner’s Zeitschr. fiir histor. Theol., 1860, pp. 218-257. 

Basilides (Βασιλείδης), who, according to Eprphanius, was of Syrian origin, taught about 
the year 130 at Alexandria. Irenzeus (I. 24) and Hippolytus (Philos. VI. 20 seq.) treat 
specially of his doctrine; cf. Jacobi, Basilidis philosophi gnostici sentent., Berlin, 1852; Bun- 
sen, Hippolytus und seine Zeit., Leips. 1852, I. p. 65 seq.; Uhlhorn, Das basilidianische Sys- 
tem, Gott. 1855; Hilgenfeld, Das System des Gnostikers Basilides, in the Theol. Jahrb., 
1856, p. 86 seq., and Die jiidische Apokalyptik, nebst einem Anhange tiber das gnostische Sys- 
tem des Basilides, Jena, 1857, pp. 287-299; Baur, Das System des Gnostikers Basilides und 
die neuesten Auffassungen desselben, in the Theol. Jahrb., 1856, p. 122 seq., and Das Chris- 
tenthum der drei ersten Jahrh., 2d ed., 1860, pp. 204-213; Lipsius, Zur Quellenkritik des 
Epiphanius, Vienna, 1865, p. 100 seq.; οἷ, also, articles in Hilgenfeld’s Zeitschr. fiir 
wiss. Theologie. Irenzeus represents the system of Basilides as more nearly allied to the 
Valentinian, while Hippolytus, on the contrary, ascribes to it a more original character. 
According to Irenzeus, Basilides taught that the Nous [reason personified] was an emana- 
tion from the unbegotten Father, that the Logos [Word] was an emanation from the Nous, 
Phronesis [practical wisdom] from the Logos, Sophia [wisdom] and Dynamis [power] were 
from Phronesis, and that the Virtues (or Forces, virtutes) and the “chiefs” and Angels— 
termed by him also primi—emanated from Sophia and Dynamis. These angels made the 
first heaven. From them emanated other angels, who made the second heaven, in the like- 
ness of the first. From the second series of angels emanated still another series, who made 
a third heaven, and so on, the whole number of heavens (or heavenly spheres) being 365, 
and all being under the rule of Abraxas or Abrasax, whose name was the Greek expres- 
sion for 365 (1 + 2 + 100 + 1+ 60 4+ 2 + 200, according to the numerical significance 
of the Greek letters). The lowest heaven is seen by us, and the angels to whom it be- 
longs are also those who formed and govern the terrestrial world; their chief is the God 
whom the Jews worshiped. This God desired to make all other nations subject to his 
chosen nation; but all the other heavenly powers arrayed themselves against him, and all 
the other nations against his nation. Seized with compassion, the unbegotten Father now 
sent his first-born Nous, who is Christ, to deliver the believing from subjection to the 
powers that rule the world. This Nous appeared in human form, yet did not suffer him- 
self to be crucified, but substituted in his place Simon the Cyrenian. He who believes on 
the crucified One is still under the dominion of the rulers of the world. It is necessary to 
believe in the eternal Nous, who was only in appearance subjected to the death of the 
cross. Only the souls of men are immortal; the body perishes. The Christian who sacri- 
fices to the gods is not thereby defiled. He who has knowledge knows all others, but is 
himself not known of others. Knowledge is the possession of but few among thousands.— 
According to Hippolytus, the Basilidians pretended to derive their system from the secret 
teachings of Christ, transmitted to them by Matthew. Basilides, he says, taught that, 
originally, there existed absolutely nothing. Out of this condition of non-being, the seed 
of the world was first made to come forth by the non-existing God, who by his will, which 
was no will (not by emanation) called forth from the non-existing the unity, which con- 
tained in itself this seed or πανσπερμία (or, according to Clem. Alex., the σύγχυσις ἀρχικῆ) of 
the entire world. In the seed was a tripartite sonship; the first rose instantly to the non- 














GNOSTICISM. 95a 


existing God, the second, less fine and pure, was, as it were, provided with wings by the 
first, receiving from it the Holy Ghost, while the third sonship, needing purification, re- 
mained behind with the great mass of the πανσπερμία. The non-existing God and the two 
first sonships (υἱότητες) are in the supra-mundane space, which is separated from the world 
that it surrounds by a fixed sphere (στερέωμα). The Holy Ghost, after having risen with 
the second sonship to the supra-mundane region, returned to the middle point between the 
supra-mundane space and the world, and thus became πνεῦμα μεθόριον (or “boundary- 
spirit”). In our world dwells the ruler of the world, who cannot ascend above the στερέ- 
wpa, and fancies that he is the highest God and that there is nothing over him; under 
him is the lawgiving God, and each of these two has begotten a son. The first of these 
two rulers (ἄρχοντες) dwells in the ethereal kingdom, the Ogdoas; he ruled on earth from 
from Adam to Moses. The second dwells in the world under the moon, the Hebdomas, 
and ruled from Moses to Christ. When now the Gospel came, or the knowledge of supra- 
mundane things (ἡ τῶν ὑπερκοσμίων γνῶσις), through the son of the world-ruler receiving, 
by the agency of the Spirit, enlightenment from the supra-mundane sonship, the world- 
ruler learned of the supreme God, and was seized with fear; but fear became for him the 
beginning of wisdom. He repented of his boasting, and so did the God who was subor- 
dinated to him, and the Gospel was announced to all dominions and powers in the 365 
heavens. By the light emanating from the supra-mundane sonship, Jesus also was 
enlightened. The third sonship now attained to that purification, of which it had need, 
and raised itself to the place where the blessed sonship already was, namely, to the non- 
existing God. When all things have been brought into their proper places, the lower 
orders become ignorant (ἄγνοια) of the higher, in order that they may be free from longing. 
The accounts of Irenzeus and Hippolytus agree in the fundamental idea that the God wor- 
shiped by the Jews had only a limited sphere of influence (like the gods of the heathen), 
and that the redemption accomplished by Christ originated with the supreme God. They 
vary most essentially in their account of the intermediate beings, who, according to Irenzus, 
were Nous, Phronesis, Sophia, and Dynamis, etc., but, according to Hippolytus, were the 
three sonships. Which of the two reports is based on the teachings of Basilides himself, 
and which on those of his followers, may be disputed. aur considers the report of Hip- 
polytus to be the more authentic, requiring us to assume that Hippolytus, elsewhere less 
well-informed than Irenzeus, his teacher and model, sometimes, and particularly in reference 
to Basilides, possessed better sources of informatioe than he did. Hilgenfeld, on the con- 
trary, holds, apparently with reason, that his own investigations, in particular, and also the 
investigations of Lipsius, have demonstrated that the Philosophumena of Hippolytus repre- 
sent only a late and degenerate form of Basilidianism. The son and disciple of Basilides, 
Isidorus, defined the ethical work of man to be the extirpation of those traces of the lower 
grades of life which still cling to us (as προσαρτήματα or appendages). The influence of 
Aristotle, from whose doctrine Hippolytus seeks to derive that of Basilides, scarcely ex- 
tended farther than to the external form in which his doctrines were presented, and to his 
astronomical opinions; the observation, on the other hand (Hippol., Philos., I. 22). that the 
doctrine of the sonship furnished with wings was borrowed from Plato, is undoubtedly 
correct. The substance of the system was derived principally from the comparison of 
Christianity with the religions before Christ (which took the form of a comparison of the 
deities of various religions). 

The most comprehensive of all the Gnostic systems is that of Valentinus, the master 
of Heracleon, Ptolemzeus, Secundus, Marcus, and many others. Valentinus lived and 
taught till near 140 in Alexandria, and afterwards at Rome. He died in Cyprus about the 
year 160. Irenzus testifies (III. 4. 3, Greek ap. Euseb., 2 4. IV. 11) that ‘‘ Valentinus 


288 GNOSTICISM. 


came to Rome in the time of Hyginus, flourished in the time of Pius, and remained 
till the time of Anicetus.” The chief sources from which our knowledge of the Valen- 
tinian System must be derived are, the work of Irenevs against false Gnosis, which is 
principally directed against the doctrine of Valentinus and Ptolemzeus, and Hippol., Philos. 
VI. 29 seq., as also Tertullian’s work, Adversus Valentinianos, and numerous passages and 
extracts in Clemens Alexandrinus. Cf. also, among others, Rossel, in his Hinterlassene 
Schriften, Berlin, 1847, Vol. II. pp. 250-300. At the summit of all existence, the Valentin- 
ians placed a single timeless and spaceless being, an uncreated, imperishable, and incom- 
prehensible Monad (μονὰς ἀγέννητος, ἄφθαρτος, ἀκατάληπτος, ἀπερινόητος, γόνιμος, Hippol., 
VI. 29). The epithets which they applied to it were Father (πατήρ, Hippol., ibid.), Fore- 
father (προπάτωρ, Iren., I. 1. 1), Depth (βυθός, Iren., ibid.), Ineffable (appyroc), and the 
“perfect Alon” (τέλειος αἰών). Valentinus himself (Iren., I. 11. 1), and many of the 
Valentinians, associated with this being, Silence (σιγῇ) or Thought (ἔννοια), as a female 
principle; but others (according to Hippol.) opposed the notion that a feminine prin- 
ciple was associated with the Father of all things, and were inclined to represent the 
latter as superior to the distinction of sex (Iren., I. 2. 4). The original father of all 
things was moved by love to beget them (Hippolyt., Philos., VI. 29: @tAépnuoc yap οὐκ ἦν" 
ἀγάπη yap, φησίν͵ ἣν ὅλος, ἡ δὲ ἀγάπη οὐκ ἔστιν ἀγάπη, ἐὰν μὴ ἡ TO ἀγαπώμενον). The 
two first products of the supreme principle were reason (νοῦς) and truth (ἀλήθεια), which, 
together with the generative and parturient principles, ‘‘depth” (βυθός) and ‘‘silence” 
(σιγῇ), constitute the τετρακτύς or quaternary of “roots” of all things (ῥίζα τῶν πάντων). 
To Nous they gave the predicate of only-begotten; the Nous was for them (Iren., ibid.) 
the ‘father and principle of all things.” Nous (and truth) gave birth to Logos and life, 
and the latter to man and church (ἄνθρωπος καὶ ἐκκλησία). All these form together an 
Ogdoas. Ten more fons descended from Logos and life, and twelve from man and 
church; the youngest of these twelve fons, and hence the youngest of the whole thirty 
/fons, was Wisdom (Sophia), a feminine Alon. The sum of these Aons constitute the Ple- 
roma, the kingdom of the fullness of divine life (πλήρωμα), which is divided into the above- 
named ogdoad, and into a decad and a dodecad. The Saviour (σωτῇρ, to whom they did not 
apply the predicate Lord), lived thirty years in obscurity, to indicate the mystery of the 
thirty AZons. Wisdom desired, ostensibly from love, but in reality from presumption, to 
come into immediate nearness to the first Father and to comprehend his greatness, as the 
Nous, and it alone, comprehemiled it; in this attempt she would have wasted all her 
energies, had not ὅρος (limit) with great pains convinced her that the supreme God was 
incomprehensible (ἀκατάληπτος). Desiring (according to the doctrine of certain Valen- 
tinians), like the supreme principle, to bring forth progeny alone, without the co-operation 
of her masculine mate, and not being truly able to do this, she gave birth to an imperfect 
being, which consisted of matter without form, since the masculine shape-giving principle 
had not co-operated with her, an οὐσία ἄμορφος, an abortion (ἔκτρωμα). Pained with this 
result, Wisdom turned imploringly to the Father, who caused her to be purified and com- 
forted by ὅρος, and restored to her place in the Pleroma, after putting an end to her striving 
(ἐνθύμησις) and her suffering. At the command of the Father, Nous and truth now ocea- 
sioned the emanation of Christ and the Holy Ghost; Christ gave form and being to that 
which Wisdom had brought forth, and then hastened back into the Pleroma and instructed 
the Atons respecting their relation to the Father, while the Holy Ghost taught them grati- 
tude and brought them to rest and blessedness. As a thank-offering, the ons, contribu- 
ting for the purpose each his best, brought to the Father, with the approval of Christ 
and the Holy Ghost, a glorious form, Jesus, the Saviour, who is also called patronymically 
the Christ and Logos. He is the common fruit of the Pleroma (κοινὸς τοῦ πληρώματος 





ἕ 


GNOSTICISM. 289 


καρπός), and the great high-priest. He was sent by the Pleroma to deliver the ἐνθύμησις 
of the superior Wisdom, who was wandering without the Pleroma, and was an inferior 
Wisdom, called Achamoth (ΠΥ 23 ΠΠ from Dan, 93M), from the sufferings which she 


endured in her search for Christ. Her emotions (πάθη) were fear, sadness, need, and 
entreaty (φόβος καὶ λύπη Kai ἀπορία καὶ δέησις or ixereia). Jesus removed these πάθη from 
her and made of them separate existences; fear he turned into a psychical desire, sadness 
into a material desire, need into a demoniacal one, and prayer or entreaty into conversion, 
repentance, and restitution of the psychical nature. The region inhabited by Achamoth is 
an inferior one, the Ogdoas. This region is separated from that of the AZons by “limit” 
(dp0¢ τοῦ πληρώματος) and by the “cross” (σταυρός). Underneath the Ogdoas is the Heb- 
domas, the region of the Psychical and of the World-builder (δημεουργός), who formed bodies 
for souls out of material substance. The material man (ὁ ὑλικὸς ἀνθρωπος)ὴ is inhabited 
sometimes by the soul alone, sometimes by the soul and by demons, and sometimes by 
the soul and the rational powers (λόγοι); the latter are disseminated in this world by 
Jesus, the joint product of the factors of the Pleroma, and by Wisdom (σοφία), and they 
enter into the soul when it is not occupied by demons. The law and the prophets were 
given by the Demiurgos; but when the time for the revelation of the mysteries of the 
Pleroma had come, Jesus, the son of the Virgin Mary, was born. He was made not 
merely like the children of Adam, by the Demiurgos, alone, but by him and (the inferior) 
Wisdom (Achamoth), or by him and the Holy Ghost, who imparted to him a spiritual 
nature, so that he became a heavenly Logos, begotten by the Ogdoas through Mary. The 
Italian school of Valentinians, and among them Heracleon (who wrote a commentary on 
the Gospel according to Luke, about 175 a. D., and on the Gospel according to John, about 
195) and Ptolemzeus (who made much use in his writings of the Gospels, including the 
fourth Gospel, which he, too, ascribed to the Apostle John, as appears from his letter to 
Flora, cited by Euseb., Haeres., XX XIII., and who interpreted them for the most part 
allegorically), in particular, taught that the body of Jesus was of a psychical nature, but 
that the spirit, which animated him, descended upon him at the time of his baptism. But 
the Eastern school, Axionicus and Ardesianes (Bardesanes?), in particular, taught that the 
body of Jesus was pneumatic, having been endowed with the Spirit from the time of his 
conception and birth. Just as the Christ, who emanated from his source at the will of 
Nous and truth, and Jesus, the product of the Pleroma, were world-restorers and saviors, 
the one in the world of ons, the other in the Ogdoas for Achamoth, so Jesus, the son 
of Mary, is the Redeemer for this terrestrial world. The redeemed become, through him, 
partakers of the Spirit; they know the mysteries of the Pleroma and the law given by the 
Demiurgos is no longer binding on them. The most perfect blessedness is reached through 
Gnosis; those psychical men, who do not advance beyond mere faith (πίστις), become par- 
takers only of partial blessedness. For these, works are essential, in addition to faith, for 
their salvation; but the Gnostic is saved without works, like a spiritual man. This doc- 
trine was used as an excuse for immorality, and especially for sexual excesses, by Marcus 
and his followers, with whom speculation was graduallv lost in eccentricities and absurd- 
ities (Iren., I. 13 seq.). ; 

The Valentinian doctrine of the error, suffering, and redemption of Wisdom lies at the 
basis of the work entitled Pistis Sophia, in which the story of the sufferings of this 
‘‘Sophia”’ is spun out at still greater length, and her songs of penitence and complaint are 
given. (Cf. Késtlin, Das gnostische System des Buches ΤΠίστις Σοφία, in the Theol. Jahrb, 
Tubingen, 1854.) 

Bardesanes (‘‘the son of Deisan,” ὦ. 6., born on the river Deisan in Mesopotamia), was 
born about 153 a. D., and died soon after 224. He simplified the doctrines of Gnosticism, 

19 


— 


290 JUSTIN MARTYR. 

Ἂς 
rendering them less repugnant to the doctrine of the Church. Yet he, too, associated 
with the Father of life, a female deity, in order to explain the work of creation. That evil 
15 not made necessary, either by natural propensity or by fate, as the astrologers pretended, 
but is a consequence of the freedom of the will, which God imparted to man conjointly 
with the angels, as a high prerogative, is clearly and impressively argued by a disciple 
of Bardesanes in the dialogue concerning fate (‘‘Book of the Laws of the Lands”), pub- 
lished by Cureton in his Spicilegium Syriacum, London, 1855. As the soul dwells in the 
body, so the spirit dwells in the soul. (Cf. Aug. Hahn, Bardesanes gnosticus Syrorum pri- 
mus hymnologus, Leipsic, 1819, and the passages from the Fihrist, in Fluegel’s Mani, 
Leipsic, 1862, pp, 161 seq. and 356 seq.; also, A. Merx, Bardesanes von Edessa, Halle. 
1863, and Hilgenfeld, Bardesanes, der letzte Gnostiker, Leipsic, 1864.) 

The religion introduced by Mam, the Persian (who, according to the most probable 
supposition, was born in 214, first publicly proclaimed his doctrine in 238, and, after nearly 
forty years of public activity, fell a victim to the hatred of the Persian priests), was a dis- 
orderly medley of Gnostic-Christian and Zoroastrian conceptions. Its philosophical interest 
is derived almost exclusively from its dualistic principle, its co-ordination of a primeval 
evil being with the good principle, and from the ascetic character of the ethics developed 
on the basis of that dualism. Augustine, who was for a time an adherent of Manichzism, 
afterward opposed it in several of his writings. (Cf. J. de Beausobre, Histoire crit. de 
Manichée et du Manichéisme, Amsterdam, 1734-39; K. A. ν. Reichlin-Meldegg, Die Theo- 
logie des Magiers Manes und thr Ursprung, Frankfort, 1825; A. F. V. de Wegnern, Mani- 
chaeorum indulgentias cum brevi totius Manichaeismi adumbratione, e fontibus descripsit, Leip. 
1827; F. Chr. Baur, Das Manich. Religionssystem, Tiibingen, 1831; F. E. Coldit, Die Entste- 
hung des Manich. Religionssystems, Leipsic, 1831; P. de Lagarde, Titi Bostrent contra Manich. 
hbri quatuor Syriace, Berlin, 1859; Fliigel, Mani und seine Lehre, Leipsic, 1862.) 

In opposition to the aristocratic Separatism of the Gnostics, on the one hand, and to 
the one-sided narrowness of the Judaizing Christians on the other, the Catholie Church 
continued to develop itself, always engaged in controversy, but, at the same time, being 
thereby incited to new positive advances. Its fixed intermediate position in matters of 
doctrine was marked by the rule of faith (regula fidet), which grew up gradually out of the 
simpler outlines given in the baptismal confession. 


§ 78. Flavius Justinus, of Flavia Neapolis (Sichem) in Palestine, 
flourished about 150 a.p. He learned first Greek philosophy, par- 
ticularly the Stoic and Platonic, but was afterward led to embrace 
Christianity, partly by the respect and admiration which the stead- 
fastness of the Christians extorted from him, and partly by his distrust 
of the power of human reason. Thenceforth he defended Christianity, 
now against heretics, now against Jews and pagans. The chief works 
by him, which have come down to us, are the Dialogue with Tryphon 
the Jew, and the greater and lesser Apologies. Whatever of truth 


is to be found in the works of the Greek philosophers and poets, and 


elsewhere, must be ascribed, says Justin, to the workings of the divine 
Logos, which is present among all men in the germ, while in Christ it 
appeared in its complete fullness. Yet the revelations made by this 
divine Word are not all equally direct; to Pythagoras and Plato it 





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JUSTIN MARTYR. 991 


spoke through Moses and the Prophets. Justin conceives Christianity 
as essentially contained in the new law of Christ, the incarnate Logos, 
who abrogated the ceremonial law, and substituted in its place the 
moral law. Future rewards and punishments are to be eternal. The 
body will be raised again. The millennial reign of Christ is to pre- 
cede the final judgment. 


Justin’s works have been published by Rob. Stephanus, 1551 (this edition was completed by Hein- 
rich Stephanus through the addition of the Oratio ad @raecoa, Paris, 1592,and the Epistle to Diogne- 
tus, 1595), Friedrich Sylburg, with a Latin translation (which first appeared at Basel, 1565) by Lang, 
Heidelberg, 1598, Morellus, Cologne, 1686, Prudentius Maranus, Paris, 1742 (included also in Gallandi’s 
Bibl. Vet, Patr., Vol. 1. 1765, and in the Opera Patr. Gr., Vols. I-III. 1777-79). The best modern edition 
is that of Joh. Car. Theod. Otto (Corpus apologetarwm Christianorum saeculi secundi, Vol. 1. : Justiné 
apolog., I. et II. ; Vol. 11.: Justini cum Tryphone Judaeo dialogus ; Vol. 111.: Justini opera addubitata 
cum fragmentis deperditorum actisque martyrii ; Vols. IV. and V.: Opera Just. subditicia, \st edition, 
Jena, 1842 seq.; 2d edition, Jena, 1847-5)). In J. P. Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Justin’s 
works constitute Vol. VI. of the Greek Fathers. On Justin cf. Kari Semisch, Justin der Mdartyrer, 2 vols., 
Breslau, 1840-42 (the earlier literature is cited by Semisch, Vol. I. pp. 2-4), and L. Aubé, St. Justin, Philoso- 
phe et Martyr, Paris, 1861. Cf. also Bohringer in the second edition of his Kirchengesch. in Biographien. 
On the time of Justin, see Volkmar, Theolog. Jahrb., 1855, pp. 227 seq. and 412 seq.; on his Cosmology, 
Wilh. Miller, Die Kosmologie in der griechischen Kirche bis auf Origenes, Halle, 1860, pp. 112-188; on 
his Christology, H. Wanbert de Puiseau, Leyden, 1864; and on his Theology, C. Weizsicker in the Jukrd. 
J. deutsche Theolog., X11. 1.1867, pp. 60-119. 


Justin opens for us the line of those Fathers and Teachers of the Church who are not 
included among the ‘‘ Apostolic Fathers.” His teaching corresponds essentially with the 
doctrine of the early Catholic Church. He is not the first author of an Apology for Chris- 
tianity, but he is the first whose apologetical writings have come down to us. Quadratus 
of Athens and Aristides of Athens were older than Justin, and presented their Apologies 
(in which they laid stress upon the difference between Christianity and Judaism) to Hadrian. 
The Apology of Quadratus is reported to have produced to some degree an effect which 
was favorable for the Christians. But Quadratus probably did not make use of philo- 
sophical arguments in his defense of Christianity, though Aristides, perhaps, did. The 
arguments of Justin were chiefly philosophical. 

There can hardly be any doubt that the Decree of Hadrian, as given by Justin at the 
close of his Greater Apology, is genuine, but it is not to be understood as condemning the 
Christians on account of common crimes rather than on account of their Christian faith. 
The class of actions contrary to law, mentioned in the decree of Hadrian, included un- 
doubtedly the refusal to bring to the gods and to the Genius of the Emperor the customary 
offerings. The well-known decree of Trajan, which indeed forbade the official searching for 
Christians, but yet recognized a capital offense in the permanent confession of a belief in 
Christianity and in the refusal to make the sacrifices required by law, remained unrepealed, 
but a milder practice was introduced through the express interdiction of all tumultuous 
proceedings, and still more by the heavy punishments with which accusers were menaced 
who should be unable to make good their charges. Under Antoninus Pius, the practice of 
the government, based on the unrepealed decree of Trajan, became again more severe, and 
this was the occasion of Justin’s Apologies. The decree was most vigorously executed 
under Marcus Aurelius, owing to his intense personal dislike of Christianity. 

In his first Apology Justin describes his circumstances in life, and in the Dialogue with 
Tryphon speaks more particularly of his intellectual history. He was born of Grecian 
parents, who, as it seems. had joined the colony which Vespasian, after the Jewish war, 


292 JUSTIN MARTYR. 


sent to the desolated Samaritan city of Sichem (from that time called Flavia Neapolis, now 
Nablus). It appears that for his intellectual discipline he repaired to Greece and Asia 
Minor. The place where his “ Dialogue with Tryphon” took place was, according to Kuse- 
bius (E. H., IV. 18), Ephesus; one passage in it (Dial. c. Tr., ch. 1, p. 217, d) may suggest 
Corinth as the locality. The instructions of his Stoic teacher left him unsatisfied, because 
they did not afford him the desired explanation of the nature of God. The Peripatetic 
disgusted him by his haste in demanding payment, which he thought unworthy of a phi- 
losopher, and he was frightened away from the Pythagorean by the requirement of the 
latter that he should first go through the mathematical sciences before commencing the 
study of philosophy. The Platonist alone was able, in all respects, for a time to satisfy him. 
Afterward, the objections raised by an aged Christian against the Platonic doctrines led 
him to doubt the truth of all philosophy and to accept Christianity. In particular, the argu- 
ments of the Christian against the natural immortality of the soul and in favor of the belief 
that immortality was a gift due alone to divine grace, appeared to him irrefutable. But 
how, he asked himself, could this view of the case have escaped the attention of Plato and 
Pythagoras? Whence can we hope for succor if such men as they are not in possession 
of the truth? While he thought and felt thus, the only alternatives open to Justin were 
either to remain a skeptic or to accept the idea that knowledge is the product of a gradual 
development, depending on continued investigation, or, finally, if he felt it necessary to 
find absolute truth somewhere, to recognize the same as immediately given by divine reve- 
lation in sacred writings. Justin adopted (just as, in their way, the Neo-Platonists and 
Neo-Pythagoreans did in the sphere of Hellenism) the last-named alternative. The Pro- 
phets—so said the aged man to Justin—are authenticated as organs of the Holy Ghost by 
their antiquity, their holiness, their miracles, and their fulfilled prophecies. They must 
simply be believed, for they demonstrated nothing, but spoke simply as witnesses of the 
truth, possessing so complete a title to our confidence that they needed not to demonstrate 
any thing. They proclaimed the Creator of the world, God the Father, and the Christ who 
was sent by him. The ability to understand their words is a gift of God’s grace, for which 
supplication must be made in prayer. These words of the old man kindled in Justin a 
love for the prophets and for the men who were called friends of Christ, and in their 
words he found what he believed to be the only certain and salutary philosophy. Of the 
works which have come down to us under his name, only the two Apologies and the Dia- 
logue with Tryphon are of indubitable authenticity. The first and larger Apology was 
written (as Volkmar has shown) in the year 147; the second and smaller one was simply 
supplementary to and continuative of the larger one. The Dialogue wiih Tryphon took 
place and was written down at a later date, not far from 4.p. 150. Justin had previously 
composed—in about the year 144—a polemical work directed against the Heretics and 
especially against Marcion. He suffered death by martyrdom somewhere between 150 
and 166, perhaps in the year 166 (Chron. Alex., ed. Rader, p. 606). 

Even after his conversion to Christianity Justin held the philosophy of the Greeks in 
high estimation, as an evidence of the universal presence among men of the divine Logos 
(or ‘“‘germinant Logos,” Λόγος σπερματικός); but the whole truth, he taught, existed in 
Christ alone, who was the incarnate Logos itself. The philosophers and poets were able, 
according to the measure of their participation in the Logos, to see and recognize the 
truth (οἱ yap συγγραφεῖς πάντες διὰ τῆς ἐνούσης ἐμφύτου τοῦ Λόγου σπορᾶς ἀμυδρῶς ἐδύναντο 
ὁρᾶν τὰ ὄντα). But the ‘‘germ,” communicated to each man according to the measure of 
his susceptibility, and the image, must not be confounded with the original Logos itself, in 
which men are allowed to participate (Apol., II. 13). Whatever is true and rational is 
Christian (ὅσα οὖν παρὰ πᾶσι καλῶς εἴρηται, ἡμῶν τῶν Χριστιανῶν ἐστιν, Apol., 11. 13). 








JUSTIN MARTYR. 293 


Christ is the Logos, in whom the entire human race has part, the first-born of God, and 
those who have lived in communion with the Logos are Christians, although they may 
have been regarded as atheists; such were Socrates and Heraclitus and their like among 
the Hellenes, and Abraham, Auanias, Azarias, Misael, Elias, and many others, among the 
non-Greeks (Apol., I. 46). Socrates proscribed Homer and spurred men on to seek for 
rational knowledge of the true God. He did not, however, consider it advisable to pro- 
claim the Father and Architect of the world to allmen. But this Christ has done, through 
the power of God. not through the arts of human speech (Apol., 11. 10). But beside the 
inner revelation made to the Greek philosophers through the omnipresent Logos, Justin 
believed that they possessed a knowledge of the teaching of Moses. The doctrine of our 
freedom as moral agents was taken, according to Justin, by Plato from Moses, and all that 
philosophers and poets have said of the immortality of the soul, of punishments after 
death, of the contemplation of heavenly things, was borrowed originally from the Jewish 
prophets. Germs of truth (σπέρματα τῆς ἀληθείας) have found their way from the latter 
to all parts of the world; but through the failure of men perfectly to apprehend this truth, 
there arose various conflicts of opinion (Apol., I. 44). Plato not only knew of the Jewish 
religion, but he was acquainted with the whole of the Old Testament, though in many in- 
stances he misunderstood it; thus, 6. g., his doctrine of the world-soul spread out in the 
form of a Greek letter Chi (by which Plato represents the angle which the Ecliptic makes 
with the Equator, Tim., p. 36) arose from his misinterpretation of the narrative of the 
brazen serpent (Numbers xxi. 9). Orpheus, Homer, Solon, Pythagoras, and others, be- 
came acquainted with the doctrines of Moses in Egypt, and were thus enabled at least 
partially to correct erroneous opinions respecting the nature of God (Cohortatio ad Graecos, 
ch. 14. We make this reference to the Cohortatio on the supposition that it is genuine, a 

‘supposition which is rendered at least doubtful by the fact that in chap. 23, vs. 70 of 
this work the doctrine of the creation of matter is taught, on the ground that God would 
have no power over uncreated matter, whereas in his Apol., I. p. 92,c, and elsewhere, 
Justin simply teaches, in agreement with Plato, that the world was made from ‘formless 
matter ”’). 

The idea of God, says Justin, is innate in man (ἔμφυτος τῇ φύσει τῶν ἀνθρώπων δόξα, 
Apol., II. 6); so, too, the most general moral ideas are possessed in common by all men, 
although often obscured (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 93). God is one, and by reason of his one- 
ness, nameless (ἀνωνόμαστος, Apol., I. 63) and ineffable (ἀῤῥητος, Apol., I. 61, p. 94, ἃ, et αἰ... 
He is eternal, unbegotten (ἀγέννητος, Apol., II., 6, et al.), and unmoved (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 
27). He is enthroned above the heavens (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 56: ἐν τοῖς ὑπερουρανίοις ἀεὶ 
μένοντος). He brought forth from himself before the formation of the world a rational 
potency (δύναμίν τινα λογικήν), the Logos, through whose agency he created the world 
(Apol., 11. 6; Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 60 seq.). The Logos became man in Jesus Christ, the son 
of the Virgin (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 48: ὅτε καὶ προὐπῆρχεν υἱὸς τοῦ ποιητοῦ τῶν bAwr, θεὸς 
ὧν, καὶ γεγέννηται ἄνθρωπος διὰ τῆς παρθένου. Christ, the Word, abolished the Mosaic 
law in which not only the sacrifices, but also the rite of circumcision and all other ritual 
ordinances were commanded only on account of the hardness of heart of the people; for 
all this Christ substituted the moral law (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 11 seq.). He is the new law- 
giver (ὁ καινὸς νομοθέτης, Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 18).—Justin thus agreed with the Jewish 
Christians in regarding the norm of moral and religious life as existing under the form of a 
law, while at the same time he joined hands with Paul (who, however, is not named by 
Justin) in going forward to the abrogation of the entire ceremonial law.—Beside God the 
Father and the Logos, his only-begotten Son, together with the angels or potencies of God, 
the Holy Ghost, or the Wisdom of God, is an object of worship (Apol., I. 6: ὁμολογοῦμεν 


294 TATIAN, ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS, AND HERMIAS. 


τῶν τοιούτων νομιζομένων θεῶν (the Hellenic gods, whom Justin calls κακοὺς καὶ ἀνοσίους 
δαίμονας) ἄθεοι εἶναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχὶ τοῦ ἀληθεστάτοι καὶ πατρὸς δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης καὶ τῶν 
ἄλλων ἀρετῶν ἀνεπιμίκτου τε κακίας θεοῦ - ἀλλ᾽ ἐκεῖνόν τε καὶ τὸν παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ υἱὸν ἐλθόντα καὶ 
διδάξαντα ἡμᾶς ταῦτα, καὶ τὸν τῶν ἄλλων ἑπομένων καὶ ἐξομοιουμένων ἀγαθῶν ἀγγέλων στρατόν, 
πνεῦμά τε τὸ προφητικὸν σεβόμεθα καὶ προσκυνοῦμεν, λόγῳ καὶ ἀληθείᾳ τιμῶντες. CF. Apol., 
I. 18: τὸν δημιουργὸν τοῦδε τοῦ παντὸς σεβόμενοι. . . τὸν διδάσκαλόν τε τούτων γενόμενον 
ἡμῖν καὶ εἰς τοῦτο γεννηθέντα ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστόν... υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τοῦ ὄντως θεοῦ μαθόντες καὶ 
ἐν δευτέρᾳ χώρᾳ ἔχοντες, πνεῦμα TE προφητικὸν ἐν τρίτῃ τάξει). Baptism is administered, 
according to Apol., I. 61, ‘‘in the name of God, the Father and Lord of all things, and of 
Jesus Christ the Saviour, and of the Holy Ghost” (ἐπ᾽ ὀνόματος τοῦ πατρὸς τῶν ὅλων καὶ 
δεσπότου θεοῦ καὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοὺῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ πνεύματος ἁγίου). The divine fore- 
knowledge does not imply fate nor destroy human freedom. The only necessity (and that 
a contingent one) that exists is, that men should receive eternal blessedness or punish- 
ment, according as they have chosen the good or the evil. The first resurrection will take 
place at the second coming (or παρουσία) of Christ, which Justin describes as near at hand 
(Apol., 1. 52; Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 31 seq., ch. 80 seq., οὐ al.); Jerusalem will be restored, 
and Christ will reign there a thousand years, granting rest and joy to his followers, ac- 
cording to the predictions of John in the Apocalypse; afterward the general resurrection 
will take place, followed by the judgment, which God will commit to Christ’s hands 
(Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 58., ch. 81). Each person will receive eternal punishment or salva- 
tion as his portion, according to the merit or demerit of his actions (ἕκαστον ἐπ’ αἰωνίαν 
κόλασιν ἢ σωτηρίαν Kat’ ἀξίαν τῶν πράξεων πορεύεσθαι, Apol., I. 12). Hell (yeévva) is the 
place where those are to be punished by fire who have lived in unrighteousness and 
have doubted as to the coming realization of that which God foretold te them through 
Christ (Apol., I. 12, 19, 44, et al.). This punishment will endure as long as it shall please 
God that souls should exist and be punished (Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 5), ἃ e., eternally (Apol., 
1. 28; Dial. c. Tryph., ch. 130), and not, as Plato supposed, merely a thousand years 
(Apol., I. 8). 

Justin’s influence on the later Church Fathers, by whom he was very highly esteemed 
as (to use the expression of Eusebius, #. #, IV. 8) a “genuine defender of true phi- 
losophy,” was so important, that it has been said not without reason (by Lange, in his 
Dissertatio, in qua Justini Mart. Apologia prima sub examen vocatur, Jena, 1795, I. p. ἡ: 
“ Justinus tpse fundamenta jecit, quibus sequens aetas totum illud corpus philosophematum de 
religionis capitibus, quod a nobis hodie theologia thetica vocatur, superstruatt.” 


§ 79. Among the Apologists of Christianity in the second century, 
the most worthy of mention, besides Justin, are Tatianus, Athe- 
nagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, and Hermias. In Tatian, the As- 
syrian, Christianity appears tempered with a haughty over-estimation 
of the value of Oriental ideas, with barbaric hatred of Hellenic cul- 
ture, and with a tendency toward a narrow asceticism. The writings 
of Athenagoras of Athens present an agreeable combination of 
Christian thought with Hellenic order and beauty of presentation ; 
Athenagoras is in this respect the most pleasing of the Christian 
authors of the period to which he belongs. Theophilus of Antioch 
discusses, more than the other Apologists, the subjective conditions 





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TATIAN, ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS, AND HERMIAS. 295 


of faith, especially the dependence of religious knowledge on purity 
of heart. Hermias’ Abuse of the Greek Philosophers is an unim- 
portant work. 


Tatian’s Discourse to the Greeks was first published, together with other patristic writings, at Zurich 
in 1546 (ed. Johannes Frisius). A Latin translation by Conrad Gesner was published at the same place in 
the same year. Text and translation were afterward repeatedly reproduced. Newer editions have been 
published by W. Worth (Oxford. 1700), Maranus (Paris, 1742), and, lastly, by J. C. Th. Otto (in his Corp. 
Apol., Vol. VI., Jena, 1851). On Tatian, cf. Daniel, Tatian der Apologet, Halle, 1837. 

The work of Athenagoras, entitled περὶ ἀναστάσεως τῶν νεκρῶν, was first printed at Louvain, 1541, and 
the Πρεσβεία περὶ Χριστιανῶν, together with the work just named, which is intimately connected in sub- 
stance with this Apology, at Zirich, in 1557, and frequently since then, last in the Corpus Apologetarum 
Saeculi 1]. ed., J. C. Th. Otto, Vol. VIL, Jena, 1857. On Athenagoras, ef. Th. A. Clarisse, De Ath. Vita, 
Scriptis et Doctrina, Leyden, 1819. 

The work of Theophilus, addressed to Autolycus, was first published at Ziirich in 1546, along with 
the Discourse of Tatian. It has recently been reproduced, together with the Commentary of Theoph. on 
the Gospels, by Otto, in the above-named Corpus Apol., Vol. VIIL., Jena, 1861. 

Hermias’ Jrrisio Gentilium Philosophorwm was first printed in Greek and Latin at Basel in 1555. 
Numerous editions have since been published, and it is contained in Maranus’ edition of Justin (1742). 


Ten authors, in all, are known to us as Apologists of Christianity, as opposod to Pa- 
ganism, in the second century. These are, besides those already mentioned in § 18, 
namely, Quadratus, Aristides, and Justin, the following: Melito of Sardis, Apollinaris of 
Hierapolis, and Miltiades the Rhetorician, whose works have not come down to us, and 
the four mentioned above, of whose works some are still in our possession: Tatian, Athe- 
nagoras, Theophilus, and Hermias. Besides Justin, Aristo of Pella and Miltiades wrote 
especially against Judaism. | 

Melito, Bishop of Sardis, wrote, among other things, an Apology for Christianity, which 
he presented to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, about the year 170. In this defense, ad- 
dressed to the philosophical Emperor, Christianity is described as a “ Philosophy,” which 
had indeed first arisen among the barbarians, but which had attained to a flourishing con- 
dition in the Roman world in the time of the Empire, to the benefit of which it had 
greatly redounded (Melito, ap. Euseb., Hist. Eccl., IV. 26). A Syriac translation of the 
Apology of Melito of Sardis has been discovered by Cureton and Renan, and has been pub- 
lished by Pitra in his Spicilegium Solesmense, II., pp. XXXVIII.-LV. (yet ef., per contra, 
Uhlhorn, in Niedner’s Z. αὶ h. Th., 1866, p. 104). 

Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis, wrote, among other things (about 180), a λόγος, to 
Marcus Aurelius, in favor of Christianity, and πρὸς “Ἕλληνας συγγράμματα πέντε (Euseb., 
Est, fecl, TV. 26, 21). 

Miltiades, a Christian rhetorician, who wrote against Montanism, composed also λόγους 
πρὸς “Ἕλληνας and πρὸς ᾿Ιουδαίους, and addressed an Apology for Christianity to the “ rulers 
of the world” (Euseb., Hist. Eecl., V. 17). 

Aristo, of Pella in Palestine, by hirth a Hebrew, wrote (about 140?) a work, in which 
the converted Hebrew, Jason, convinces the Alexandrian Jew, Papiscus, after a long dis- 
pute, of the truth of Christianity. This end is effected maimly by showing how the Mes- 
sianie prophecies are fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth (Hieron., Quaest. in Genes. sub. init. ; 
Maximus in Scholia ad librum Dionysii Areopag. de mystica theologia, ch. 1). The work 
was therefore probably of but slight importance as a contribution to the philosophy of 
Christianity. Celsus, the pagan opponent of Christianity, mentions the work of Aristo 
with derision (Origen, Contra Cels., ed. Paris., I., 1. IV., p. 544), and Origen only cefends 
it partially and feebly. 


296 TATIAN, ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS, AND HERMIAS. 


Tatian, an Assyrian by birth, received, according to his own statement (Orat. ad Gr., 
ch. 42), the education of a Greek, but became subsequently a convert to Christianity, the 
despised *‘ philosophy of the barbarians.” Trenzeus (Adv. Haeret., I. ch. 28) represents that 
he was a pupil of Justin. In his work addressed “to the Greeks” (πρὸς “EAAnvac, written 
about 160-170 a. D.), which is still extant, and in which (as Ritter expresses it, Gesch. der 
Philos., V. p. 32), “we see often less of the Christian than of the barbarian,” Tatian labors 
to depreciate Greek culture, morals, art, and science, the better to recommend in their 
stead Christianity. To this end he does not disdain to revive the most vulgar calumnies 
which had been raised against the most illustrious Greek philosophers, at the same time 
misrepresenting their teachings (Orat. ad Gr., ch. 2). With barbaric despotism of abstrac- 
tion, he includes in the category of immoralities the sensuous wants of man, when esthetic- 
ally refined and transfigured, as well as his brutish lusts, so far as both are not controlled 
by the moral rules, in order thereby to present Christian purity and continence in a clearer 
light (6. g., ch. 33: καὶ ἡ μὲν Σαπφὼ yivaioy πορνικὸν ἐρωτομανὲς καὶ τὴν ἑαυτῆς ἀσέλγειαν 
ὕδει: πᾶσαι δὲ αἱ παρ᾽ ἡμῖν σωφρονοῦσι καὶ περὶ τὰς ἠλακάτας αἱ παρθένοι τὰ κατὰ θεὸν 
λαλοῦσιν ἐκφωνήματα τῆς παρ᾽ ὑμῖν παιδὸς σπουδαιότερον. As to his dogmatic attitude, 
Tatian pays especial attention to the development of the doctrines of God, as the rational 
principle and the hypostasis of the universe (ὑπόστασις τοῦ παντὸς); of the Logos, as the 
being whose nature is actual reason, and who issued from God by the will of God, not by 
the way of division. but by communication, like light from light; of the creation of the 
world and of the resurrection, of the sin of Adam, which resulted in the deep degradation 
of the human race, but did not destroy our freedom of will; and of redemption and regene- 
ravion through Christ (ch. 5 seq.). At a later epoch Tatian espoused the doctrines of the 
Valentinian Gnostics, and subsequently founded or contributed to build up the sect of the 
Encratites who rejected marriage as sinful, as also the use of animal food and wine, and 
even substituted water for wine in the celebration of the Eucharist. 

Athenagoras of Athens, according to the very doubtful authority of Philippus Sidetes 
(a teacher in the school of catechists, in the fifth century), was for a time at the head of 
the school of catechists at Alexandria (see Guericke, De schola, quae Alexandriae jflorwit 
catechetica, Halle. in Saxony, 1824). He was familiar with Greek, and especially with the 
Platonic philosophy. In his Apology, the Πρεσβεία (Supplicatio) περὶ Χριστιανῶν, which he 
addressed in the year 176 or 177 to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and to his son and col- 
league Commodus, Athenagoras defends the Christians against the threefold accusation of 
atheism, unchaste associations, and Thyestian repasts. In replying to the first charge, he ὁ 
appeals to the declarations of Greek poets and philosophers against polytheism and in 
favor of the unity of God, and develops the doctrine of the divine Trinity. Athenagoras 
seeks to establish the unity of God by an a priori proof, which meets us here for the first 
time in Christian literature. If there were more Gods than one, he argues (Suppl., ch. 8), 
these Gods must be at once unlike and in different places; for only those things are similar 
to each other and co-ordinate which are formed after a common model, and are therefore 
temporal and finite, and not eternal and divine; and there cannot be different localities for 
the abode of different Gods, for the God who formed the round world occupies the space 
outside the world, as being himself a supra-mundane being (ὁ μὲν κόσμος σφαιρικὸς ἀποτελεσ- 
θεὶς οὐρανοῦ κύκλοις ἀποκέκλεισται, ὁ δὲ τοῦ κόσμου ποιητὴς ἀνωτέρω τῶν γεγονότων, ἐπέχων 
αὐτὸν τῇ τούτων προνοία), and it is impossible that another God should exist either within 
the limits of the world-sphere, or there where the world-builder is; and 1f such a God 
existed beyond the latter locality in or around another world, his existence would not 
concerG& us, and, besides, on account of the limited sphere of his existence, he would be 
no true God. 





TATIAN, ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS, AND HERMIAS. 297 


Hellenic poets and philosophers, incited to inquiry by the divine Spirit, have them- 
selves taught the unity of God, says Athenagoras; but perfect clearness and certainty of 
knowledge are obtained only from the divine instructions imparted to us in the Holy Scrip- 
tures, in the writings of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other prophets, who abandoned all 
ideas peculiar to themselves and were employed by the Holy Ghost as organs, just as the 
flute is used by the flutist (Swppl., chs. 5-9). All things were made by God, through his 
intelligence or Logos, which, since God is necessarily a rational being, has always existed 
with him. The Logos came forth from God to be the prototype of the world and the 
active force (idéa καὶ ἐνέργεια) in all material things, and is thus the first product of the 
Father, or the Son of God. Father and Son are one; the Son is in the Father and the 
Father in the Son through the unity and power of the Spirit. The Spirit also, which 
wrought in the Prophets, is an emanation from God (ἀπόῤῥοια τοῦ Θεοῦ), going forth from 
him and returning to him like a ray of the sun. We acknowledge, as the object of our 
worship, God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and we recognize their solidarity in power 
and their orderly division (τὴν ἐν τῇ ἑνώσει δύναμιν καὶ τὴν ἐν τῇ τάξει διαίρεσιν): nor do 
we confine our theology to this, but believe that angels and servants of God have been 
assigned by the Logos to assist in the conduct of the world (ch. 10). We prove our faith 
in God by our purity of heart and our love to our enemies (ch. 11); for we are convinced 
that after death we shall be obliged to render an account for our lives (ch. 12). Christians 
cannot participate in the worship of the many pretended Gods of the various nations (ch. 
13 seq.). Athenagoras denies the charges of immorality directed against the Christians, 
appealing to the well-known purity of the morals of the latter (ch. 32 seq.). 

The work by Athenagoras on the Resurrection of the Dead contains an introduction (ch. 
1) and two principal parts. The first part (chs. 2-10) is taken up with the refutation of 
objections; the second (chs. 11-25) contains the positive arguments. If the resurrection 
were impossible, argues Athenagoras, it must be from a lack either of ability or of will on 
the part of God. He would lack the requisite ability, provided—and only provided—he 
were deficient in knowledge or in power. But the work of creation shows that he is 
deficient in neither. If it is held that the resurrection of the body is impossible on ac- 
count of the fact that our bodies are perpetually undergoing material change, so that the 
same varticles may belong at different times to different human bodies, to all of which 
they can obviously not be restored at the resurrection, Athenagoras replies by denying the 
supposed fact, on the ground that every being assimilates from that which it takes as 
nutriment only such elements as agree with itself, and that no elements of the human 
body can be transformed into animal flesh and then be assimilated a second time by a 
second human body. If God has not the will to raise again the bodies of men, it must be 
because—and only because—such a resurrection would involve an injustice to those who 
were raised or to other creatures, or because it would be unworthy of God. But nefther 
of these suppositions is correct, the first for obvious reasons, and the latter, because if it 
were unworthy of God to raise the dead, then it must have been unworthy of him to 
create man in the first instance. The positive arguments by which Athenagoras defends 
the doctrine of the resurrection are founded, 1) on the reason of man’s creation, which 
was that he might always contemplate the divine wisdom, 2) on the nature of man, which 
demands that he should live eternally, in order that he may realize the life according to 
reason, 3) on the necessity of a divine judgment on men, 4) on the fact that in this life the 
end for which man was created is not attained, this end consisting neither in the absence 
of pain nor in sensuous pleasure, nor in the felicity of the soul alone, but in the contem- 
plation of the truly-existent Being and in rejoicing in his decrees. 

Theophilus of Antioch informs us (Ad Awdolyc., 1. 14) that he was led to embrace 


298 TATIAN, ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS, AND HERMIAS. 


Christianity by reading the prophetic parts of the Holy Scriptures. In his work addressed 
to Autolycus (written soon after 180) he admonishes the latter likewise to believe, lest, 
remaining in unbelief, he be afterward, to his detriment, compelled to believe by those 
eternal punishments of hell, which the Prophets and, stealing from them, Greek poets and 
philosophers have foretold (1. 14). To the demand of Autolycus, ‘‘Show me thy God,” 
Theophilus replies (ch. 1): “Show me thy man,” 7. e., show me whether thou art free from 
sin, for only the pure can see God. To the demand, “Describe God to me,” he answers 
(I. 3): ‘God’s nature is ineffable; his honor, greatness, loftiness, power, wisdom, goodness, 
and grace transcend all human conceptions. If I call God light, I name but his image; if I 
call him Logos, I name his dominion; if reason (νοῦς), his insight (φρόνησις); if spirit, his 
breath; if wisdom, his creation; if strength, his power; if energy, his efficient agency; if 
providence, his goodness; if dominion, his glory; if Lord, then 1 term him a judge; if a 
judge, then I pronounce him just; if Father, then I say that he is loving (ἀγαπῶντα, 
according to Heumann’s conjecture, for τὰ πάντα, or, more correctly, Creator, on the sup- 
position of Grabe, that τὰ πάντα being correct, the word ποιήσαντα has fallen out; ef. ch. 
4: πατὴρ διὰ τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν πρὸ τῶν ὅλων, and Philo, De Nom. Mut., ed. Mangey, I. p. 
582 seq., where θεός͵ ποιητικὴ δύναμις, δ ἧς ἔθηκε τὰ πάντα and πατήρ are given as equiva- 
lent expressions); and if I call him fire, 1 name thereby the anger which he cherishes 
against evil-doers.” He is unconditioned, because without beginning, and immutable, as 
he is immortal. He is called God (θεὸς) because he established all things (διὰ τὸ τεθεικέναι 
τὰ πάντα) and because he moves and works (διὰ τὸ θέειν). (Oed¢—Zend: Daéva; Persian: 
Dew and Diw (daemon)—is derived, as is now known, from the root Div, to be bright or 
glitter, Sanser. Déva, the shining one.) God created all things for his glory (I. 4: ta πάντα 
ὁ θεὸς ἐποίησεν ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων εἰς τὸ εἶναι, ἵνα διὰ τῶν ἔργων γιγνώσκηται Kal νοηθῇ TO μέγεθος 
αὐτοῦ). The invisible God is known from his works, just as from the regulated course of a 
ship the presence of a helmsman can be inferred. God made all things through his Logos 
and his Wisdom (I. 7). The Logos was from eternity with God (as Λόγος ἐνδιάθετος ἐν τοῖς 
ἰδίοις [τοῦ θεοῦ] σπλάγχνοις [1]. 10] or ἐνδιάθετος ἐν καρδίᾳ θεοῦ [11. 22]); before the world 
was he who was “reason and wisdom” (νοὺς καὶ φρόνησις) was God’s counsellor (σύμβουλος). 
But when God willed the creation of the world, he begot this Logos, placing him out of 
himself (τοῦτον τὸν Λόγον ἐγέννησε προφορικόν) as the first-born before the creation, not as 
though he became thereby himself deprived of a λόγος, but so that the λόγος, after the act 
of generation, remained still a part of God (II. 24). The three days before the creation of 
the heavenly luminaries were types of the triad: God, Logos, and Wisdom (11. 15: τύποι 
τῆς τριάδος Tov θεοῦ Kai τοῦ λόγου αὐτοῦ καὶ τῆς σοφίας). God, who created us, can and 
will create us once again at the resurrection (I. 8). The names of the Greek gods are 
names of deified men (I. 9 seq.). The worship of the gods through images is irrational, 
and the doctrines of pagan poets and philosophers are foolish. The writings of Moses and 
the prophets are the oldest Scriptures, and contain that truth which the Greeks have for- 
gotten and rejected (II., II.)—To what extent the Commentary on the Four Gospels, which 
has come down to us bearing the name of Theophilus, is genuine, cannot be determined 
with certainty. The polemical work of Theophilus against Marcion, mentioned in the 
Hist. Eccl. of Eusebius, as also the similar work against Hermogenes, the Aristotelianizing 
and Platonizing speculator (who supposed an original, uncreated, chaotic matter, on which 
God's power was exerted, in a manner like that in which the magnet attracts iron, a doc- 
trine which was opposed also by Tertullian), and other writings of Theophilus, are lost. 
Hermias is an author who appears to have lived in the first half of the third century 
after Christ. since he represents it as the fundamental doctrine of Plato, that God, matter, 
and form are the original causes of all things, and in this representation agrees with the 





IRENZUS AND HIPPOLYTUS. 299 


eclectic Platonists of the second century (cf. above, § 65), but not with the Neo-Platonists 
who lived after Plotinus. In his ‘“‘ Abuse of the Pagan Philosophers” (διασυρμὸς τῶν ἔξω 
φιλοσόφων), he endeavors to show how the views of those philosophers involve contradic- 
tions. ‘Now I am immortal and rejoice, now I am mortal and Jament; now I am ground 
into atoms, or become water, air, fire; I am made an animal of the forest, or a fish—at last 
comes Empedocles and makes me a bush.” Since Hermias does not enter into the grounds 
and the systematic connection of the views which he combats, and still less understands 
the order and law of development of the Grecian philosophy, his work has no scientific 
value. Heathen philosophy he considers as a gift of demons, who sprung from a union 
of fallen angels with earthly women (and not, like Clemens of Alexandria, as a gift of 
God, delivered to man by the inferior angels). 


ὃ 80. Irenzeus, who was born about 140 a.p., in Asia Minor, and 
died in about the year 202 while Bishop of Lyons and Vienne in Gaul, 
was a pupil of Polycarp. He is of importance in the history of the 
development of Christian thought chiefly as an opponent of the 
Gnostics. Irenzeus ascribes the growth of Gnosticism to the corrupt- 
ing influence of ante-Christian philosophy on the Apostolic tradition. 
Denouncing that freedom of speculation which had degenerated into 
mere lawlessness of the imagination, and that Antinomianism which 
had degenerated into a libertinism hostile to morality, he lays special 
emphasis on Christian tradition and the Christian law, and is hence 
to be regarded as one of the founders and principal representatives of 
the early Catholic Church. Maintaining the identity of the supreme 
God with the Creator of the world and with the author of the Mosaic 
law, Irenzeus (with Paul) explains the difference between the revela- 
tions of the Old and New Testaments as arising from the nature of 
God’s plan for the education of the human race, in which plan the 
Mosaic law was included as a means of preparation for Christianity. 
The Son or Logos and the Holy Ghost are one with the Father and 
instruments in the works of creation and revelation. Christ has con- 
firmed the essential part of the law, the moral law, and has made it 
more broad by including among its objects the intentions of men, 
while at the same time he has declared us free from its external 
ordinances. Man freely decides for or against the divine command, 
and receives accordingly reward or punishment in eternity.—In the 
same circle of ideas moves also the disciple of Irenwus, the Roman 
presbyter Hippolytus, who, with more completeness than Irenzeus in 
details, but at the same time less impartiality, seeks to demonstrate 
the heathen origin of the Gnostic doctrines. 


The earliest editions of the works of Irenrus are those of Erasmus: Opus eruditissimum divi Irenaei 
episcopi Lugdunensis in quingue libros digestum, in quibus mire retegit et confutat veterum haereseon 
imptas ac portentosas opiniones, ew vetustiss, codicum collatione emend. opera Des. Erasmi Roterodami 


300 TRENEUS AND HIPPOLYTUS. 


ac nune primum in lucem ed. opera Jo. Frobenii. Basel, 1526; 2d ed., 1528, 8d, 1584, ete.; on these are 
based the editions of Gallasius (Geneva, 1570), Grynwus (Basel, 1571), Feuardentius (1575-76; 1596, etc.), 
Grabe (Oxford, 1702), Massuet (Paris, 1712, and Venice, 1784), and Ad. Stieren (Leipsic, 1858), which latter 
edition is accompanied with Massuet’s essays on the Gnostics and on the life, writings, and doctrines of 
Ireneus. The writings of Ireneus fill Vol. VII. in that division of Migne’s Cursus Patrologiae which is 
devoted to the Greek Fathers. Bohringer treats with special fullness of Ireneus in Die Kirche Christi, 
I. 1, 2d ed. Ziirich, 1861, pp. 271-612. There exist, besides, monographs on the Christology of Irenwus (by 
L. Duncker, Gétt, 1843), on his Cosmology (W. Moller, Die Kosmologie in der griechischen Kirche, etc., 
pp. 474-506), on his Eschatology (Moritz Kirchner, in Theol Stud. und Kritiken, 1868, pp. 815-858), and on 
his doctrine concerning grace (Joh. K6rber, J. de gratia sanctificante, diss. inaug., Wirtzburg, 1865). 

The work of Hippolytus, κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων ἔλεγχος, of which formerly only the first book, under 
the title, Origenis Philosophumena, was known, was discovered by Mynoides Mynas in 1842, and pub- 
lished in 1851 (cf. above, p. 21). Other writings of H. have been collected together by P. A. Lagarde under 
the title Hippolyti Romani quae feruntur omniu Graece, Leipsic and London, 1858, Οὗ C. W. Haenell, De 
Hippolyto episcopo, tertit saeculi scriptore, Gott. 1838; Bunsen, Hippolyius und seine Zeit, Leips. 1852- 
D3; Déllinger, HWippolytus und Kaillistus, Munich, 1853; J. E. L. Gieseler, Ueber Hippolytus, die ersten 
Monarchianer und die rim. Kirche in der ersten Hdlfte des dritten Jahrh., in Theol. Stud. u. Kr., 1858 ; 
Volkmar, Hippolytus und die rémischen Zeitgenossen, Ziirich, 1855. 


In a letter to Florinus (ap. Stieren, I. pp. 822-824) Irenzus mentions that he remem- 
bers very exactly the discourses of the aged Polycarp, of whom, in his boyhood, he, 
together with Florinus, was a pupil. Polycarp suffered martyrdom in 167 A. D.; Irenzus 
may have received his instruction not long before that date. According to Hieronymus 
(Br., 75), he was also a pupil of Papias. Soon after this Irenzeus came to Lyons in Gaul, 
at which place he was made presbyter, and, after the martyrdom of Pothinus in the year 
177, bishop. Hieronymus names Ireneus as a Christian martyr, and Gregory of Tours 
(Hist. of Gaul, I. 27) affirms that he suffered death in the persecution under Severus (about 
A. D. 202). His chief work: Showing up and Refutation of the Knowledge falsely so-cailed 
(ἔλεγχος καὶ ἀνατροπὴ τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως) has come down to us in an ancient Latin 
translation; yet many fragments, and in particular the largest part of the first book, have 
been preserved in the original text. This work is especially directed against the Valen- 
tinians. It was composed (according to III. 3. 3) at the time when Eleutherus held the 
office of Bishop of Rome (7. e., about 180 A. D.; but different portions of it were written 
at different times). Eusebius (£. H., V. 26) mentions a treatise by Irenzeus against Hellenic 
science, and also an exposition of the doctrines announced by the Apostles, and other 
writings. Irenzus designates as the fundamental characteristic of Gnosticism, the blas- 
phemy that the supreme God and the Creator of the world are two different beings; and 
of the same nature with this division of the Father into two beings is, according to him, 
the division of the Son into a plurality of arbitrarily-assumed beings (as seen particularly 
in the teachings of the Valentinians). The Gnostic pretence that Jesus taught an esoteric 
doctrine is pronounced false by Irenzeus. The true Gnosis is the apostolic doctrine, as 
delivered to us by the Church. Irenzeus reminds his readers of the limits of human 
knowledge. The Creator is incomprehensible, transcending all human imagination. He is 
intelligent, but not after the manner of human intelligence; he is light, but not like what 
we know as light. All our notions of him are inadequate. It is better to know nothing, 
to believe in God and abide in his love, than through subtle investigations to fall into 
atheism. Whatever we know of God we know through his revelation of himself. With- 
out God’s aid, God cannot be known. Just as those who see the light are in the light, so 
those who perceive God are in him and participate in his splendor. God himself is the 
creator of the world. In it he reveals himself to man and by it the better class of hea- 
thens have already known him. What he did before the creation of the world he himself 
only knows. Matter owes its existence to God’s will. In creating the world God was 
guided only by that plan which he had formed in his own mind. He had no need of (the 








IRENZUS AND HIPPOLYTUS. 301 


Platonic) ‘‘archetypes;” besides, if such archetypes existed, then there must have existed 
archetypes of those archetypes, and so on in infinitum. In God nothing is without mea- 
sure; the measure of the Father is the Son, who in Jesus became man, who knows the 
depths of the divine nature, and who 1s the steward and distributor of the Father’s grace, 
to the blessing of humanity; the Son or the Word, and the Spirit or the Wisdom of God 
are the hands of the Father. But we cannot measure the greatness of God. Jesus, the 
Son of the Virgin, was man in reality, and not in appearance only, and he lived through 
every period of life (till he was nearly fifty years old). When man was created, God 
impressed on his heart the natural moral law, and this impression was not effaced by 
the fall of man and the consequent introduction of sin into the world. This law was ex- 
pressed in the decalogue; but the Jews, owing to their proneness to fall away from God, 
received in addition the ceremonial law, which was intended to restrain them from the 
worship of idols, and contained types of Christ, but which was not intended to remain 
always in force. Christ has taken away the bonds of servitude which it contained, and 
extended the decrees of freedom, but has not abrogated the decalogue. The revelations 
in nature, and in the Old and New Covenants, mark the three stages in the plan of salva- 
tion. It is the same God whose aid is given to men at these different stages, according 
to their different needs. Just as truly as Christ had a material body, so truly will our 
bodies also be raised again; it is not our souls alone that will continue to exist. The 
soul of man does not exist before his body, nor is there such a thing as the transmigra- 
tion of souls. That the soul can immediately rise to God after the death of the body, 
Trenzeus pronounces to be an heretical notion, held indeed by some who are called ortho- 
dox, but which is inconsistent with the true doctrine of the gradual advancement of 
the righteous in the next world, and which ignores the fact that we can only by degrees 
become accustomed to incorruption. At first all souls must go into Hades, whence they 
will rise at the time of the resurrection and will again be clothed with their bodies. But, 
before this, Antichrist must appear, and then the separation of the good from the bad, 
which will have been proceeding in the measure of the progress of the divine revelations, 
will be completed. By Antichrist is to be understood Satan incarnate in human form. 
When he shall have reigned for a time (three and one-half years) and sat enthroned in 
the temple at Jerusalem, Christ will come from heaven in the same flesh in which he suf- 
fered, and in the glory of the Father, and will cast Antichrist and his followers into the 
lake of fire. This will happen when the world shall have stood exactly six thousand 
years, or one thousand years for each day of its creation. Christ will then reign one 
thousand years among the righteous who have been raised from the dead, or during the 
period which is to correspond with the seventh day of creation, the day of rest. The 
citizens of this kingdom will live in blessed, painless fruition, and will be rewarded for 
their former perseverance amid vexations and sufferings. The earth itself will then be 
restored by Christ to its original condition. This kingdom of rejoicing is to be the king- 
dom of the Son. It will be followed by the kingdom of the Father, ὦ. 6., by eternal 
blessedness; for as the Spirit leads men through faith to the Son, so the Son leads those 
who obtain salvation to the Father. But since the same God who is good is also just, a 
second resurrection will take place after the expiration of the reign of the Son, when the 
unrighteous will also be raised, and that to judgment. All who deserve punishment will 
receive it in the souls and bodies in which they turned aside from the offers of divine 
grace. This punishment will consist in the loss of all the blessings of grace; it will be 
eternal and infinite, as are also the blessings of God. 

Hippolytus, a pupil of Irenzeus (according to Photius, Cod. 121), was a Roman pres- 
byter, and is reported to have been exiled to Sardinia in the year 235. Ona pillar in the 


809 IRENEUS AND HIPPOLYTUS. 


vicinity of Rome, Hippolytus is represented as sitting on a Cathedra, on which a list of his 
works, and also the Easter-cycle, as reckoned by him, are engraved. Among the works 
thus mentioned is one bearing the title: περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς οὐσίας, and as the author of 
the ἔλεγχος, cited above, designates himself (in the 10th book) as the author of a work 
under this title, it follows that the ἔλεγχος is with probability to be ascribed to Hippolytus. 
To Hippolytus also 1s attributed a σύνταγμα κατὰ αἱρέσεων, and the author of the ἔλεγχος 
mentions (in his Introduction) a smaller work, in which he had previously treated of the 
doctrines of the heretics, and which appears to have been identical with the σύνταγμα men- 
tioned. It is true that Photius assigns the περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς οὐσίας to the Roman pres- 
byter Cajus, whom Baur (Theol. Jahrb., 1853, 1. 3) considered as the author of the ἔλεγχος; 
but the relation of the statements issuing from Cajus respecting Cerinthus to those con- 
tained in the ἔλεγχος, and facts reported by Dionysius of Alexandria and Eusebius 
respecting Cajus, militate against attributing to him the work in question. (J. L. Jacobi, 
Duncker, Bunsen, Gieseler, Déllinger, and A. Ritschl regard Hippolytus as the author of 
the ἔλεγχος.) Others have ascribed the work to other authors, but without sufficient rea- 
son. The ἔλεγχος κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων was written after the death of Callistus, Bishop 
of Rome, which took place in the year 223; if Hippolytus was its author, it must therefore 
have been written between A. D. 223 and 235. Hippolytus seeks in his works to demon- 
strate that the errors of the Gnostics were not derived from the Sacred Scriptures and 
Christian tradition, but from the wisdom of the Hellenes, from the doctrines of various 
heathen philosophers, and from pagan mysteries and astrology (Book I., Prooem.). In his 
exposition of Valentinianism he follows Irenzeus substantially, but the Basilidean doctrine 
he had studied for himself, although it is still doubtful whether his knowledge of that doc- 
trine was derived from original writings of Basilides, or (what is perhaps more probable), 
from later works, written by persons belonging to a branch of the school. The Hellenes, 
says Hippolytus, glorified the parts of creation, since they knew not the Creator, and the 
heresiarchs have followed after them (X. 32). The one God, who is over all, begot first 
the Logos; and by Logos is meant, not speech, but that idea of the universe which is 
immanent in God (ἐνδιάθετον tov παντὸς λογισμόν). This Logos was not, like all the rest of 


creation, created out of nothing; God created it out of his own substance. Thus the 


Logos, as being consubstantial with God, is itself God (διὸ καὶ θεός, οὐσία ὑπάρχων θεοῖ). 
The world was created by the Logos, at the command of the Father, out of nothing; it is 
therefore not God, and it can be annihilated whenever God wills it. Man was created a 
dependent being, but endowed with free will; the misuse of this freedom is the source of 
all evil. Since man is free, God has placed him under law; for the beast is governed by 
whip and bit, but man by command and reward and punishment. The law was first laid 
down by just men, and, more especially, afterward by Moses; the Logos, which warns and 
leads men to obey the law, has exerted its influence in all times; it has in these last days 
appeared personally to men, as the Son of the Virgin. Man is not God; but if thou wilt 
even become God (εἰ δὲ θέλεις καὶ θεὸς γενέσθαι), obey thy creator and transgress not his 
commandment, that, found faithful in that which is less, thou mayest be entrusted with 
that which is greater (X. 33). There are not two Gods, but only one, in whom there are 
two persons, and a third economy, the grace of the Holy Ghost. The Logos is the intelli- 
gence, which came forth from God and was revealed in the world as the Son of God. ΑἹ] 
things are through him; he comes from the Father, as light from light, or water from its 
source, or the ray of hght from the sun. God is only one, whether considered as the com- 
manding Father, the obeying Son, or the enlightening Holy Ghost. It is impossible other- 
wise to believe in the one God than by truly believing in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost 
(Hippol., Contra Haeres. Noéti, 11 seq.). 


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TERTULLIAN. 303 


΄ 


Ἵ § 81. Tertullian (160-220), Presbyter of Carthage, went, in his 
opposition to Gnostic and especially to Marcionitic Antinomianism, 
to an extreme of ascetic ethics and legality, which transcended the 
limit maintained by the Church, and brought him finally to adopt 
the Puritanism of the Montanists (which was founded on an energetic 
belief in the speedy return of Christ). According to him, Chris- 
tianity was a law, the new law of Jesus Christ. Tertullian was | 
unfriendly to speculation. Philosophy, in his opinion, was the mother 
of heresies; Jerusalem should be completely separated from Athens, 
the Church from the Academy. His anti-philosophical tendency | 
culminated in the proposition: Credo quia absurdum est. 


Tertulliani Opera ed. Rhenanus, Basel, 1539; ed. Rigaltius, Paris, 1635, 1666; ed. Semler and Schitz, 
Halle, 1770; E. F. Leopold in Gersdorf’s Bibl. Patr. Lat., Vols. 1V.-VII., Leipsic, 1839-41; F. Oehler, 3 
vols., Leipsic, 1853-54. Works on him by J. A. Nosselt (De vera aetate ac doctrina scriptorum Tertul- 
liani, Halle, 1768), W. Miinscher (Darstellung der moralischen Ideen des Clemens von Alexandrien und 
des Tertullian, in Henke’s Magazin fiir Religionsphilosophie, Exegese und Kirchengeschichte, Vol. VI., 
Helinst. 1796, pp. 106 seq.), Neander (Antignosticus, oder Geist des Tertullian und LEinleitung in dessen 
Schriften, Berlin, 1825, 2d edition, 1849), Schwegler (in his work on Montanism, Tubingen, 1841, p. 302), 
Hesselberg (Tert. Lehre, entwickelt aus seinen Schriften, Part I.: Leben und Schriften, Dorpat. 1848), 
Engelhardt ( Tertullian’s schriftstellerischer Character, in the Zeitschr. f. hist. Theol., 1852, 2), G. Uhlhorn 
(Fundamenta Chronologiae Tertullianae, diss. inaug., Gottingen, 1852); ef. also Bohringer’s account 
of Tertullian’s doctrine in the second edition of his Kirchengesch. in Biographien. 


Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born at Carthage, about A. D. 160, of hea- 
then parents, and was first educated for the law. In about 197 4.p. he was converted to 
Christianity. He joined the Montanists in about the year 200, according to Nosselt and 
Hesselberg, or, according to the more probable supposition of Uhlhorn, in 202; others fix 
the date at 204-206. In developing his Christian theology, he was influenced by the 
judicial habit of mind resulting from his previous legal studies, while, in defending it, he 
employed that peculiar eloquence which had characterized him as an advocate; he made 
the spirit secondary to the law, and Christ, so to speak, the servant of Moses. His 
writings (as classified by Neander) are partly apologetic, addressed to pagans, and relat- 
ing to the conduct of the Christians under the persecutions of the former—partly ethical 
and disciplinary, and partly dogmatic and polemical. Ante-Montanistic works of the first 
class are the Ad Martyres, De Spectaculis, De Idolatria, Ad Nationes, Apologeticus (about 
A. Ὁ. 200), De Testimonio Animac; of the second class: De Patientia, Oratione (Prayer), 
Baptismo, Poenitentia, Ad Uxorem, De Cultu Feminarum; of the third class: De Praescrip- 
tione Haereticorwm. Montanistic works of the first class: De Corona Militis, De Fuga in 
Persecutione, Contra Gnosticos Scorpiace, Ad Scapulam (Proconsulem); of the second class: 
De Exhortatione Castitatis, Monogamia, Pudicitia, Jejuniis, Virginibus Velandis, Pallio; of 
the third class: Adversus Marcionem, Adv. Hermogenem, Adv. Valentinianos (if written by 
Tertullian), De Carne Christi, Resurrectione Carnis, Anima, Adversus Praxeam. 

Of all the ancient Church Fathers (except Tatian) Tertullian emphasizes most the 
opposition between morality and the sensuous nature of man, as also between the divine 
revelation and human reason. The divine mysteries cannot, indeed, in the last analysis, 
be opposed to reason, says Tertullian; God is the creator of matter, and the dualism of the 
Manicheans is false. But the monism thus avowed by Tertullian is constantly left by him 
in the background, and the antagonism of principles is portrayed in fiery declamations. 


904 TERTULLIAN. 


What have the philosopher and Christian in common? The disciple of Greece and the 
disciple of heaven? The aspirant for earthly honor and he who aspires to (eternal) life? 
The maker of words and the performer of deeds? The destroyer and the builder-up of 
things? The friend and the enemy of error? The corrupter and the restorer of truth, its 
thief and its guardian? What have Athens and Jerusalem, the Church and the Academy, 
heretics and Christians, in common with each other? Our doctrine has come down from 
the porch of Solomon, who himself left us as his legacy the injunction, to seek the Lord 
in simplicity of heart. Let those who offer us a Stoic, or Platonic, or dialectical Christian- 
ity, retlect what they are doing. There is no more curiosity for us, now that Christ has 
come, nor any occasion for further investigation, since we have the Gospel. We are to 
seek for nothing which is not contained in the doctrine of Christ. The Christian may not 
search for more than it is permitted him to find; the Apostle forbids endless questions. 
What could Thales, the first of the Physiologists, tell Croesus with certainty respecting 
the Godhead? Socrates was condemned, because, by destroying the gods, he advanced 
nearer to the truth; but even the wisdom of Socrates is not to be highly estimated, for who 
would have known the truth without God, and to whom is God known without Christ? 
Who can understand Christ without the Holy Ghost, and to whom has it been given thus 
to understand him, without the sacrament of faith? Socrates, as he himself confesses, was 
led by ademon. Every Christian laborer has found God; he shows him forth, and can 
answer every question that is asked concerning God, while Plato assures us that it is 
difficult to find the architect of the world, and that it is not practicable, if possible, to 
make him known to all, when found. O thou poor Aristotle, who hast discovered for the 
heretics the art of dialectic, the art of building up and destroying, the art of discussing 
all things and accomplishing nothing! What doest thou, O daring Academy? Thou 
uprootest the whole organism of human life, thou destroyest the order of nature, thou 
deniest the providence of God, when thou supposest that the senses, which God has 
given to his creatures, are deceptive as means of knowledge and unreliable as instruments 
for the practical uses of life (an anticipation of Descartes’ argument from the véracité de 
Dieu). Poets and philosophers have drawn special, isolated truths from the Old Testa- 
Ment, bnt they have corrupted them and ambitiously claimed them as discovered by them- 
selves. The philosophers are the patriarchs of the heretics. Platonism furnished the 
material for the Valentinian heresy, and Stoicism for the Marcionitic. The Epicureans are 
the fathers of those who deny the immortality of the soul, while all the philosophical 
schools lend support to the deniers of the resurrection. Those heretics who teach that 
matter is equally original with God draw upon Zeno’s doctrine; those who speak of the 
“fiery God” have learned of Heraclitus. The philosophers contradict each other. While 
they hypocritically pretend to possess truth, the Christian possesses it indeed. Only the 
Christian is wise and true, and no one is greater than he. Even the offices of Ludimagistri 
and Professores Literarum are incompatible with the Christian character. Christianity is in 
contradiction with human wisdom and culture. ‘‘ Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet, quia 
pudendum est. Et mortuus est det filius; provsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. . Et sepultus 
resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est.” 

Like human thought, so also the human will is viewed by Tertullian as entirely cor- 
rupt. Instead of considering the sensuous nature of man as that which may be permeated, 
and, so to speak, filled out with the ideal, he leaves the former in all its crudeness, in 
order that he may the more successfully combat and condemn it, and in order that he may 
find in it, in so far as it is the necessary and inexpugnable basis of spiritual life, the source 
of universal depravity. JMatrimonium and stuprum are both alike forms of commiztio 
carnis, and are distinguished only by the legal form. (In some passages, however, Tertul- 





Ἶ 





TERTULLIAN. 805 


lian rises superior to his principle, and describes Christian marriage as a real life-commu- 
nion.) Celibacy (‘pure virginity”) is best; but God permits us to marry once, out of 
regard for our frailty (De Echort. Castit., chs. 1,9; De Monog., ch. 15). Tertullian’s Chris- 
tian (like Tatian’s) is “‘an angel riding on a tamed beast.” With regard to marriage and 
the family, “fuga saeculi is synonymous for him with fleeing from the world of moral 
action.” 

As in the doctrine of the Stoics (of whom Seneca, at least, was held in high estimation 
by Tertullian), so also in the doctrine of Tertullian, a dualistic ethics, in which the sensuous 
nature is condemned, is united with a sensualistic theory of cognition and a materialistic 
psychology. Tertullian’s ontology is a gross form of Realism. He teaches: The senses 
do not deceive us. All that is real is material. The materiality of God and the soul is 
without prejudice to the exalted nature of the former and the immortality of the latter 
(Nihil enim, si non corpus. Ommne quod est, corpus est sui generis ; nihil est incorporale, nist 
quod non est, De Anima, 1; De Carne Chr.,11. Quis enim negaverit, deum corpus esse, etst 
deus spiritus est? spiritus enim corpus sui generis in sua effigie, Adv. Prax., 7). The soul) 


- has the same form as the body, and is delicate, luminous and aeriform in substance. If it 


were not material, it could not be acted upon by the body, nor would it be capable of 
suffering, and its existence in the body would not depend on the nourishing of the latter 
(De Anima, 6 seq.). The soul of the child comes from the semen of the father, like a shoot 
(tradux) from the parent-stock of a plant, and it afterwards increases gradually in sense 
and understanding (De Anima, 9). Every human soul is a branch (surculus) of Adam’s 
soul. With the soul the spiritual qualities of the parents are transmitted to the children; 
hence the universal sinfulness of the children of Adam (tradux animae tradux peccati). But 
together with this inherited sin, a remnant of goodness or of the divine image remains in 
us (quod a deo est, non tam extinguitur, quam obumbratur), so that sin becomes in us our 
own free work. The soul is naturally drawn toward Christianity (anima naturaliter Chris- 
tiana, De Testim. An. 1 seq.; Apolog., 17), as is seen in the fact that the simplest and most 
natural manifestations of the religious consciousness among polytheists manifest an inyol- 
untary tendency to return to the original monotheistic belief of humanity. 

Just as the sun is not known by us in its real substance as it exists in the heavens, but 
only in its rays which are shed upon the earth, so God is never revealed to man in the full- 
ness of his majesty, but only according to our human faculties of comprehension, as ἃ 
human God, who has revealed himself in his Son (Adv. Praz., 14). Since God is the 
greatest of beings, he can be only one (Adv. Marc., I. 3, 5). He is eternal and unchange- 
able, free, subject to no necessity; his nature is reason, which is one with his goodness. 
Even anger and hate may be predicated of God; with his goodness is joined the attribute 
of justice (Adv. Marc., I. 23 seq.; 11. 6 seq.). So soon as God found Wisdom to be neces- 
sary for the work of the creation of the world, he conceived it in himself and begot it, a 
spiritual substance, bearing the characters of the revealing Word, the all-disposing reason 
and the all-executing power. On account of the oneness of this substance with the substance 
of God, it also is called God. It came forth from God, just as the ray breaks forth out of 
the sun; God is in it, as the sun is in the ray, the substance in each case being only 
extended, but not separated. Spirit came from spirit, God from God, light from light, with- 
out the source of existence being in either case thereby diminished. The Father is the 
whole substance of the Godhead, while the Son is a derivative from and a part of that 
substance, as he himself confesses, saying: ‘‘The Father is greater than I” (Adv. Hermog., 
18; Apol., 21, Adv. Praxeam, 9). Reason always existed in God, but there was a time 
when the Son did not exist. The Son first came into existence when and because the 
Father had need of him as an instrument for the creation of the world, and so cmsed the 

20 


906 MONARCHIANISM, ARIANISM, AND ATHANASIANISM. 


Son to come forth from himself as the second person in the Godhead (Adv. Pram., 14; Adu, 
Hermog., 3). But time, in the proper sense of the term, first began with the existence of 
the world; the Goodness, which made time, was, before the existence of time, without 
time (Adv. Marc., 11. 3). Like the Son, so also the Holy Ghost came forth from the divine 
substance (Adv. Praw., 26). The third to Father and Son is the Spirit, just as the third to 
root and branch is the fruit of the branch, the third to source and stream is the mouth of 
the stream, the third to sun and ray is the extremity of the ray. Thus the Trinity is not in 
contradiction with the divine monarchy, and is in accordance with the economy of the uni- 
verse (Adv. Prax., 8), The world was created out of nothing, and not out of a material 
substance, which had eternally pre-existed, nor was it created from eternity. God was God 
before the creation of the world; but it is only since the creation that he has become 
Lord. The former title is the name of the substance of God, the latter designates his 
power (Adv. Hermog., 3 seq.). Man was created after the image of God; God, in the 
formation of the first man, being guided by the model of the man Christ who was to come 
(De Resurr., 6). The gods of the heathen are fallen angels, who allowed their love for 
mortal women to lead them away from God (De Cultw Femin., I. 2). 

Justice was originally an undeveloped ‘‘ Nature,” which feared God. Through the Law 
and the Prophets it attained next to childhood (yet only among the Jews, since God was 
not among the heathen; the heathen stood without, like the drop on the bucket; they are 
the dust on the threshing-floor). Through the Gospel it grew into the strength of youth. 
Through the new (Montanistic) prophecy, which demands perfect sanctification, it is 
developed into the maturity of manhood (De Virginibus Velandis, 1). The souls of the dead 
await in Hades the resurrection and the judgment. A blessed lot is in store for the right- 
eous; all deformity, natural or acquired, will be removed, and the female sex will be con- 
verted into the male (De Resurr., 57; De Cultu Fem., I. 2). 

Tertullian deserves especial remembrance on account of his energetic defense of relig- 
ious freedom. The choice of one’s religion is, he says, the right of every individual. It 
is not religious to seek to force men into religion (Humani juris et naturalis potestatis est 
unicuique quod putavertt colere. Nec alii obest aut prodest alterius religio. Sed nec religionis 
est cogere religionem, quae sponte suscipit debeat, non vi, guum et hostiae ab animo libenti expos- 
tulentur. Ita etsi nos compuleritis ad sacrificandum, nihil praestabitis diis vestris, Ad Scap., 2. 
Colat alius Deum, alius Jovem, alius ad Coelum supplices manus tendat, alius ad aram Fidei, 
alius, si hoc putatis, Nubes numeret orans, alius Lacunaria, alius suam animam Deo suo voveat, 
alius hircit. Videte enim, ne et hoc ad irreligiositatis elogiwm concurrat, adimere libertatem 
religionis et interdicere optionem divinitatis, ut non liceat mihi colere quem velim, sed cogar 
colere quem nolim. Nemo se ab invito coli volet, ne homo quidem, Apol., ch. 24). Yet it may 
be doubted, whether Tertullian would have conceded the same religious liberty to heathens 
and heretics, if the Christians had been in the majority and in possession of the civil 
power; the unmistakable satisfaction with which he speaks of the future torments of the 
enemies of Christ (De Spectac., 30, 61-62; Conf. Apol., 49, 295), hardly permits us to 
suppose it. 


§ 82. The moral reaction excited by the Antinomianism of the 
Gnostics led to a legal conception of Christian ethics, investing the 
latter with a character akin to, but not identical with, Jewish legal- 
ism. The leaders in this reaction defined Christianity as the new law 
of Jesus Christ, and in the persons of Tertullian and the Montanists 
overstepped the limit of doctrine prescribed by the Church. In like 








MONARCHIANISM, ARIANISM, AND ATHANASIANISM. 307 


manner the speculative reaction against Gnostic polytheism (and Do- 
cetism), and especially against the doctrine that the supreme God was 
not identical with the Creator of the world, led to the placing of 
renewed emphasis on the doctrine of monotheism. The result of 
this was not a simple return to the monotheism of the Jewish reli- 
gion, but a return to a form of monotheism nearly allied to Judaism, 
and in Monarchianism the leaders in this reaction went beyond the 
trinitarian middle-ground chosen by the Church. Monarchianism is 
the doctrine of the unity of God, excluding the doctrine of the 
Trinity, or the doctrine that the Father, as One divine person, is 
alone Lord of all, and that the Logos and Holy Ghost have no sepa- 
rate, personal existence. Monarchianism is Modalism, in so far as 
the Logos and the Holy Spirit are viewed by it as modes of the exist- 
ence or essence of God, or even merely as modes in which he reveals 
himself. Monarchianism was taught variously in the form of a modi- 
fied Ebionitism, of Patripassianism, and of a doctrine mediating be- 
tween these two. The earlier Church Fathers, in whose teachings 
the dogma of the Trinity had not attained to that distinct form to 
which it was afterward developed in the Church, leaned, so far as 
they avoided Monarchianism, almost without exception to a form of 
that doctrine which asserted the subordination of the Son and the Holy 
Ghost to the Father, and which afterward received its most distinct 
expression in Arianism. ‘The doctrine finally adopted by the Church, 
and which is commonly named after Athanasius, agreed with Monar- 
chianism in its opposition to the theory of subordination, and in its 
doctrine of the identity in essence of the Father and the Logos and 
the Spirit, while, in agreement with the theory of subordination, it 
affirmed the complete personal distinction of the three, and opposed 
their reduction to mere attributes or even to mere forms of the revela- 
tion of One divine person. 


In regard to the abundant literature of the subjects of this paragraph, it may suffice, in view of their 
8pecifically theological character, to refer to such leading works as those of Baur and Dorner, cited above 
(p. 263), and to Schleiermacher’s treatise on Sabellianism, Werke, I. 2, pp. 485-574, Mohler’s Athanasius, 
Mayence, 1827, and Heinr. Voigt, Die Lehre des Athunasius von Alecandrien, Bremen, 1861. 


In so far as the development of the doctrines of the unity and trinity of God was 
founded on the biblical passages which relate to the Father, to Christ, and to the Holy 
Ghost, it belongs only to positive theology to treat of it; but in so far as it was founded 
on speculative grounds, it belongs at once to the history of theological dogmas and to the 
history of Christian philosophy. In this place a summary exposition will suffice, all the 
more, owing to the minute and exhaustive treatment which this controverted subject 
usually and of necessity receives in works on dogmatic history. 


908 MONARCHIANISM, ARIANISM, AND ATHANASIANISM. 


One fraction of the Monarchians, the followers of Artemon, asserted that until the time 
of Victor, Bishop of Rome, their doctrine was the reigning one in the Roman Church, and 
that it was first proscribed by Victor’s successor, Zephyrinus (after 4. Ὁ. 200). This may 
be an exaggerated statement, rendered possible only by the indefiniteness of the earliest 
formulas of Christian doctrine; yet that Monarchianism, connected with a legalistic 
theory of morals, was in the earlier times of Christianity in fact widely extended, is evi- 
dent from numerous writings that have been traced back to the Apostolic Fathers, and 
especially from the, for a long time, highly esteemed work, the ‘‘Shepherd of Hermas,” 
and also from the testimony of an opponent of Monarchianism, namely, Tertullian (Adv. 
Praxeam, ch. 3: simplices quique, ne dixerim imprudentes et idiotae, quae major semper cre- 
dentium pars est, quoniam et ipsa regula fidei a pluribus diis saeculi ad unicum et verum Dewm 
transfert, non intelligentes unicum quidem, sed cum sua οἰκονομίᾳ esse credendum, expavescunt 
ad οἰκονομίαν. Numerum et dispositionem trinitatis divisionem praesumunt unitatis, quando 
unittas ex semet ipsa derivans trinitatem non destruatur ab illa, sed administretur. Itaque duos 
et tres gam jactitant a nobis praedicari; se vero wnius Dei cultores praesumunt, quasi non et 
unttas irrationaliter collecta haeresim faciat, et trinitas rationaliter expensa veritatem constituat). 

Theodotus of Byzantium and Artemon are representatives of that form of Monarch- 
lanism which was nearly allied to deism, or rather to the doctrine of the Ebionites, which 
was founded on the revelation of the Old Testament, and also to the synoptic form of doc- 
trine. Theodotus taught that Jesus was born of the Virgin according to the will of the 
Father, and that at his baptism the higher Christ descended upon him. But this higher 
Christ Theodotus conceived as the Son of Him who was at once the supreme God and the 
Creator of the world, and not (with Cerinthus and other Gnostics) as the son of a deity 
superior to the God of the Jews. Artemon supposed a special influence to have been 
exerted by the supreme God on Jesus, whereby he was distinguished from all other men 
and made the Son of God. In the teachings of these Monarchianists the Logos-conception 
is not found. 

Noetus of Smyrna taught (according to Hippol., Philos., 1X. 7 seq.) that the one God, 
who created the world, though in himself invisible, had yet from most ancient times ap- 
peared from time to time, according to his good pleasure, to righteous men, and that this 
same God had himself become also the Son, when it pleased him to submit to being born; he 
was consequently his own son, and in this identity of the Father and the Son consisted the 
“monarchia” of God. (Hippolytus compares this doctrine with the Heraclitean doctrine 
of the identity of contraries, expressing his belief that the former arose from the latter.) 
An associate and disciple of Noetus was Epigonus, who brought the doctrine he professed 
to Rome; and his pupil, again, was Cleomenes, who defended the doctrine of Noetus in the 
time of Bishop Zephyrinus, the successor of Victor. With this Cleomenes, according to 
Hippolytus, Callistus, the successor of Zephyrinus, was on terms of friendship, and was 
of like opinion (teaching: τὸν λόγον αὐτὸν εἶναι υἱόν, αὐτὸν καὶ πατέρα, ὀνόμασι μὲν (δυσὶ) 
καλούμενον͵ ἔν δὲ bv, τὸ πνεῦμα ἀδιαίρετον). The one person is indeed nominally, but not 
in essence, divided (ἔν τοῦτο πρόσωπον ὀνόματι μὲν μεριζόμενον, οὐσίᾳ δ' ov). Father and 
Son are not two Gods, but one; the Father as such did not suffer, but he “suffered with” 
the Son (Philos., IX. 12: τὸν πατέρα συμπεπονθέναι τῷ υἱῷ, ov . . . πεπονθέναμ). 

The Monarchian, Praxeas, who taught at Rome in the time of Victor, and against 
whom Tertullian wrote a polemical work, appears to have adopted the opinions of Noetus 
and to have taught that the Father descended into the Virgin. He distinguishes the 
divine and human in Christ as spirit and flesh; but by the flesh he understands human 
nature entire. Christ, he says, suffered, as man; to the Father, or God in him, Praxeas 
ascribed a co-passion (compati). 








MONARCHIANISM, ARIANISM, AND ATHANASIANISM. 309 


The doctrine of Sabellius may be looked upon as a return from the Patripassian form of 
Monarchianism to the earlier form, coupled with the adoption of the Logos-conception and 
such modification of the latter as the case required. Sabellius of Libya was Presbyter of 
Ptolemais, in the African Pentapolis, and lived at Rome under Zephyrinus. He is one of 
the most important representatives of Monarchianism, which is often called after his name 
(Sabellianism). He discriminated (according to Athanas., Contra Arianos, 1V.; Epiphan., 
Haer., 62; Basilius, Hpist.; Hippol., Philos., IX. 11 seq.) between the Monas and the Trias, 
and taught: ἡ μονὰς πλατυνθεῖσα γέγονε τριάς (ap. Athanas., Orat., IV., Contra Arian., § 13). 
From this it might appear as if the Monas were related to Father, Son, and Spirit, as 
the common foundation of all three, and as if the latter were the three forms in which it 
was revealed, namely, as the Father, before the time of Christ, in the creation of the 
world and the giving of the law (or in the general relation of the Monas to the world); 
secondly, as Christ; and lastly, as the Spirit in the Church. This is the interpretation 
given by Schleiermacher in his essay on Sabellius (1822; Werke, Vol. 1. 2, pp. 485-574), and 
with him many of the more recent investigators, and also Baur, substantially, have agreed. 
But with the expression cited is joined the following (ibid., § 25): ὁ πατὴρ ὁ αὐτὸς μέν ἐστι, 
᾿ πλατύνεται δὲ εἰς υἱὸν καὶ πνεῦμα, Which places it beyond doubt, that by the Monas, which 
is expanded into Son and Spirit, the Father himself was meant, and that therefore the doc- 
trine of Sabellius is distinguished from the (Philonic and) Johannean, according to which 
the Father is the absolute God and the Logos is the revealing principle, only by its non- 
recognition of the proper personality of the Logos (and by the greater prominence given in 
it to the doctrine of the Holy Ghost—which indeed was somewhat inconsequent, since it 
would have been more natural that the Holy Ghost should have been regarded by Sabel- 
lius rather as an attribute of the Logos), and not by its causing God to recede (like the 
other persons of the Godhead) into a secondary position with reference to the Monas. 
How little is proved by the expression, 7 μονὰς πλατυνθεῖσα γέγονε τριάς, against the iden- 
tity of the Monas with the Father, is obvious from the perfectly analogous expression 
employed by Tertullian in his own name: wnitas ex semet ipsa derivans trinitatem, while yet 
there can be no doubt that Tertullian himself regarded the Father as absolutely first and 
original, and conceived the Son and Spirit as derived from him. The Logos came forth 
from God for the creation of the world, and especially for the creation of man (iva ἡμεῖς 
κτισθῶμεν͵ προῆλθεν ὁ λόγος). The Logos is the divine reason, not a second person, but a 
faculty of God; as a person (or an hypostasis) the Logos appeared first in Christ. The 
Logos is not subordinate to God the Father, but is identical with God’s essence; but its 
hypostatic existence in Christ was transitory. As the sun receives back into itself the ray 
which went forth from it, so the divine Logos, after its hypostatization in Christ, returned 
again to the Father or Monas. Cf. Voigt, Athan., pp. 249, 265 seq. 

The (Sabellian) idea that the Logos, although existing before its manifestation in Christ, 
was not previous to that event a distinct person, having a distinct essence, but was only 
immanent in the essence of God the Father, was expressed by Beryllus, Bishop of Bostra 
in Arabia (according to Euseb., Hist. Eccl., VI. 33) in the formula: Christ, previously to his 
life upon earth, did not possess a distinct personal existence (κατ᾽ Wiav οὐσίας περιγραφήν), 
and his divinity was not originally his own, but only the divinity of the Father dwelling in 
him (μηδὲ θεότητα ἰδίαν ἔχειν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐμπολιτευομένην αὐτῷ μόνην τὴν πατρικήν). (Yet it has 
been attempted, though incorrectly, to find in the historical data concerning Beryllus’ doc- 
trine a proof that the latter agreed with the doctrine of Noetus.) Beryllus was brought 
over by Origenes (who, however, ascribed personal pre-existence to all men, and hence, 
in logical consistency, naturally ascribed the same to the spirit of Christ) to the doctrine 
of the Church, that the Logos, as a person distinct from God the Father, existed before 


810 MONARCHIANISM, ARIANISM, AND ATHANASIANISM. 


the incarnation. Cf. Ullmann, De Beryllo Bostreno, Hamb. 1835, and Heinr. Otto Friedr. 
Fock, Die Christologie des Beryll von Bostra, in Niedner’s Zeitschrift fiir histor. Theol., Leips. 
1846, pp. 376-394. 

The consequences of Sabellianism for the doctrine of the person of Christ were drawn 
especially by Paul of Samosata. If the Logos is not a second person, but only the rational 
energy of God, then Jesus (as also each of the prophets who were filled with the Holy 
Ghost) must have been a distinct person from God and a man. While, therefore, the 
Logos, as the rational energy of God, is not subordinated to God, but is, rather, identical 
with him, Christ, as a person, must stand in the relation of subordination to God the 
Father. Jesus, according to Paul of Samosata, was, although begotten in a supernatural 
manner, yet in himself only a man, but he became the Son of God and became God by his 
moral perfection (τεθεοποίηται). The reason or rational energy of God dwelt indeed in him, 
yet not by means of a substantial union of the God and the man in him, but through the 
exertion of a divine influence, by which his human powers of understanding and will were 
increased. Paul of Samosata disputed (according to Athanas., De Syn., ch. 51) the theory 
of the homousia, or consubstantiality of two divine persons, the Father and the Son; if this 


theory were true, he argued, the οὐσία, or substance common to both, would necessarily rank * 


as the first and absolute existence, while the two persons would be related to each other, 
not as father and son, but as two brothers or as common sons of the original οὐσία. That 
the doctrine here controverted by Paulus is identical in substance with that defended by 
Sabellius (as Baur argues), the Monas of Sabellius bearing the same relation to the persons 
of the Godhead as does the οὐσία in the above representation, is an incorrect assumption, 
as shown by the account already given of the doctrine of Sabellius. The arguments of the 
Samosatan are directed rather against the doctrine adopted by the Church, from which he 
draws the above consequence, by whose acknowledged absurdity he seeks to overthrow 
the postulate from which it is derived. (And in fact the Synod at Antioch, in the year 
269, which maintained the distinction of persons and the identity of Christ with the second 
person of the Godhead, rejected the term ὁμοούσιος, in order to escape the consequence 
indicated by Paulus and finally adopted by Synesius). 

The subject of Arianism, which teaches that the second person of the Godhead is subor- 
dinate to the Father and that there was a time when this person was not existing, as also of 
the conclusion of the controversy concerning these points by the triumph of the Athanasian 
doctrine of the equality in essence (homousia) of the three persons of the Godhead, and of 
the further development of doctrine which took place within the bosom of the Church, may 
here be omitted, as topics belonging to ecclesiastical and dogmatic history, it being sufficient 
for our purpose thus to have called attention to the dogmatic basis of the next succeeding 
stadium of philosophical speculation. The motives which led to the triumph of Atha- 
nasianism were not so much of a scientific as of a specifically religious and ecclesiastical 
nature. A laudatory account of the life and doctrine of Athanasius has been written, from 
the Catholic stand-point, by J. A. Mohler (Mayence, 1827); H. Voigt (Bremen, 1861) treats 
of the same subject from the stand-point of Orthodox Protestantism. Whatever judgment, 
for the rest, may be passed on Athanasius (296-373), whether the dogma which he suc- 
cessfully advocated be thought to mark a real advance toward a purer expression of the 
idea of God and man as united in one, or whether there be found in it a concealed tri- 
theism, which afterward Augustine and others again modified so as to make it more con- 
sonant with the monotheistic idea, the historic fact must in any case be acknowledged, 
that the Athanasian form of the doctrine in question, not only in respect of terminology, 
but also in respect of conception and application, was not known in the Christian Church 
from the beginning, but marks, on the contrary, a later stadium in the development of 


Li 





CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 311 


Christian thought. In the view of the earlier Christians, who taught that the world was 
created or formed in time, the Logos was a being who came forth from God for the pur- 
pose of that formation or creation. Origen’s doctrine of the eternal creation of the world 
attributed also to the Logos an eternal personal existence, which was likewise in harmony 
with Origen's doctrine of the pre-existence of human souls. Later orthodoxy let fall the 
pre-existence of souls and the eternity of the creation of the world, but held fast to the 
doctrine of the eternal existence of the Logos as a second person, begotten of God the 
Father, whereby its rank was so much elevated that it was but a short advance to the 
formula of homousta. The Holy Ghost, finally, which originally was only the spirit of 
God itself, was now, with a species of logical consistency, placed as a third person in the 
same rank with the first and second persons. That the nature of the religious conscious- 
ness of man renders these hypostatizations necessary, and that the denial of them must 
lead to an unreligious pantheistic speculation, or else to abstract deism, can hardly be 
asserted with justice. The biblical conception of man’s religious consciousness includes 
the possibility of the inspiration of man by the Spirit of God, unassociated with adherence 
to any fixed dogmas, and with this conception the Sabellian doctrine (to which, rather 
than to the Athanasian, Schleiermacher, on good religious grounds, gave the preference) 
would seem more nearly accordant than that which finally prevailed in the Church. Faith 
in development and in historical progress degenerates into unphilosophical superstition 
when might and success are made the criteria of right and truth. 


§ 88. The reaction against Gnosticism was accompanied by an 
attempt on the part of some of the teachers of the Church to assimi- 
late the legitimate elements of Gnosticism to the doctrine of the 
Church. In particular, Clement of Alexandria and Origenes, who 
were teachers in the school for catechists at Alexandria, may be re- 
garded as representatives of a class of Gnostics, who strove to remain 
free from all heretical tendencies and to maintain an entire agreement 
with the universal (catholic) faith of the Church, and who, in the gen- 
eral character of their teachings, though not in every separate point of 
doctrine, were successful in this attempt. This party were well dis- 
posed toward Hellenic science, and in particular toward Hellenic 
philosophy, which they sought to bring into the service of Christian 
theology. Philosophy, teaches Clement—applying to Paganism the 
same method of historical and philosophical judgment which Irenzeus 
and Tertullian employed with reference to primitive times and with 
reference to Judaism and Christianity—philosophy served among the 
Hellenes the same end which the law served among the Jews,—it 
educated them for Christianity ; and for those whose faith depends on 
scientific demonstration it must still serve as a discipline preparatory 
for the Christian doctrine. Clement and Origen seek, by means of an 
allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament Scriptures, to prove 
the oneness of Judaism and Christianity. Christianity, they say, is 


812 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 


Judaism unveiled; in the former the revelation of God has become 
more perfect. The Gnosis of the heretics is at fault in not recog- 
nizing the identity of the Creator and Lawgiver of the world with 
the Father of Jesus Christ, and in despising the world and denying 
the freedom of the will—In their Christology, Clement and Origen 
lean toward a form of the doctrine of subordination, which recognizes 
only in God the Father the absolute and eternal being, conceives the 
Son and the Spirit as persons in the full sense of the word, and repre- 
sents them as having come forth from the Father from eternity 
according to the will of the Father, and as not equal with the Father. 
The creation of the world is viewed by Clement and Origen as an act 
of God, accomplished not in time, but from eternity. To the human 
soul Origen (with Plato) ascribes pre-existence before the body, into 
which latter it descended in consequence of some moral delinquency. 
The soul is endowed with free will. It is on the freedom of the will 
that the distinction between good and bad, virtue and vice, reposes ; 
in its full recognition of human freedom lies the peculiar ethical 
character of Christianity, as opposed to Paganism. Active obedience 
to the divine commands is the condition of salvation. It was in 
virtue of his freedom that the divine and human were united in 
Christ. In the person of Christ the divine and human interpenetrate 
each other, as when iron is heated through by fire. Christ’s redemp- 
tive act was a contest against demoniac powers; every Christian 
who denies the world and obeys God’s commandments takes part 
in this contest. The end of all things will come when the punish- 
ment of transgressions shall have been accomplished, and will consist 
in the restoration (Apokatastasis) of all men to their original good- 
ness and blessedness, in order that God may be all in all. 


On the question whether and to what extent the theology of the Church Fathers in general, and that 
ef the Alexandrians in particular, was affected by the philosophy of Plato and the Neo-Platonists, treat 
Souverain (Le Platonisme dévoilée ow essai touchant le verbe Platonicien, Cologne [Amsterdam], 1700; 
German translation by Léffler, Zillichau, 1792), Franciscus Baltus (Défense des SS. Péres accusés de 
Platonisme, Paris, 1711), Mosheim (De turbata per recentiores Platonicos ecclesia, first published in 1725. 
and reprinted in connection with his translation of Cudworth’s Systema Intellectuale, Leyden, 1773), Keil 
(De causis alieni Platonicorum recentiorum a relig. Christiana animi, 1785, and in his “ Programms” 
De doctoribus veteris ecclesiae culpa corruptae per Platonicas sententias theologiae liberandis, 1793, 
reprinted in Keil’s Opuse. Acad., ed. Goldhorn, sectio posterior, Leipsic, 1821, pp. 389-858), Oelrichs (De 
doctrina Platonis de Deo a Christianis et rec. Platonicis varie expl. et corrupta, Marburg, 1788), Dahne 
(De γνώσει Clementis Alewandrini et de vestigiis neoplatonicae philosophiae in ea obviis, Leipsic, 1831), 
Alb. Jahn (Dissert. Platonica, Bern, 1839), Baumgarten-Crusius (Lehrbuch der Dogmengesch., 1. 67 seq.), 
Heinrich v. Stein (Der Streit iiber den angebl. Platonismus der Kirchenvdter, in Niedner’s Zeitschr. f. hist. 
Th., 1861, No. 8, pp. 819-419, and in the second part of his @esch. des Platonismus, Gottingen, 1864), In 
relation to this question may also be compared various essays and articles, such as Clausen’s (Apologetase 








CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 813 


ecelesiae Chr. ante-Theodosiani Platonis ejusque philosophiae arbitri, 1813), Ehler’s and others’ (see 
above, § 41, p. 117). 

Of the Alexandrian School for Catechists, treat Guericke (Halle, 1824-25), and C. F. W. Hasselbach (De 
schola, quae Alewandriae florwit, catechetica, Stettin, 1826, and De Catechwmenorum ordinibus, ibid., 
1839) ; cf. Baumgarten-Crusius (Dogmengesch., I. p. 126), Schnitzer ( Origenes p. V.), Redepenning (Origenes, 
I. p. 57 seq.), and also Matter, in his Hist. de Vécole d Alewandrie, Paris, 1840, and J. Simon, Hist. de ecole 
@ Alewandrie, Paris, 1845. 

The works of Clement of Alexandria have been edited by P. Victorius (Florence, 1550), Fried. Sylburg 
(Heidelberg, 1592), Potter (Oxford, 1715), Frid. Oberthur (Herbipoli, 1780), Reinhold Klotz (in Bibliotheca 
sacra patrum ecclesiae Graecorwm, Part IIL., Leipsic, 1831-34); in Migne’s Cursus they form Vols. VIII. 
and IX. of the Greek Fathers. Of Clement treat Munscher (see above, under Tertullian), P. Hofstede de 
Groot, Disp. de Clemente Alex. philosopho christiano, Groningen, 1826, Dihne, De γνώσει Clementis Alew., 
(see above), Lepsius, “ On the πρῶτα στοιχεῖα in Clemens Alex.”, in the hein, Ifus., 1836, pp. 142-148, 
Reinkens, De Clemente presvytero alecandrino, homine, scriptore, philosopho, theologo libero, Breslau, 
1851, Herm. Reuter, Clem. Alex. theol. moralis capita selecta, comm. acad., Berlin, 1853, H. Lammer, 
Clem. Alew. dé λόγῳ doctrina, Leipsic, 1855, Hébert-Duperron, Hssat sur la polémique et la philos. de 
Clément d@’ Alewandrie, 1855, J. Cognat, Clément d’ Alerandrie, sa doctrine et sa polémique, Paris, 1858, 
H. Schirmann, Die hellenische Bildung und ihr Verhdliniss zur christlichen nach der Darstellung des 
Clem. v. Alex. (G.-Pr.), Minster, 1859, Freppel, Clément d’Alexandrie, Paris, 1866; cf. also, particularly, 
Baur, in his Christliche Gnosis, pp. 502-540, and W. Mdller, in the work above cited (Kosmologie der 
griechischen Kirche), pp. 506-535. 

Of the works of Origen, the Latin texts were edited by J. Merlin (1st edition, Paris, 1512-19); the 
work Adversus Celswm appeared in print first at Rome, A. p. 1481, in the Latin translation of Christophorus 
Persona, and was first edited in Greek by David Hoschel (Augsburg, 1605), and afterward by W. 
Spencer (Cambridge, 1658; 2d edition, 1677); his Commentaries, in Greek, on ἃ part of the Bible were 
edited and published, together with introductory essays by Huetius (Rouen, 1668, Paris, 1679, ete.); his 
complete works have been published by C. and C. V. Delarue (Paris, 1733-59), Oberthur (15 vols., Wurz- 
burg, 1780-94), and by C. H. E. Lommatzsch (Berlin, 1831-47). The work περὶ ἀρχῶν has been separately 
published by Redepenning (Leipsic, 1836). In Migne’s Cursus the works of Origen fill Vols. XL-XVII. 
Of Origen treat, among others, Schnitzer (Origenes iiber die Grundlehren der Glawbenswissenschaft, 
Stuttgart, 1836), G. Thomasius (Origenes, Nuremberg, 1837), Redepenning (Origenes, eine Darstellung 
seines Lebens und seiner Lehre, Bonn, 1841-46), Kriger (on Origen’s relation to Ammonius Saccas, in 
Illgen’s Zettschr., 1843, I. pp. 46 seq.), Fischer (Commentatio de Origenis theologia et cosmologia, Halle, 
1846), Ramers (Des Orig. Lehre von der Auferstehung des Fleisches, Trier, 1851), Fermand (Zxposition 
crit. des opinions @ Origéne sur la nature et Torigine du péché, Strasburg, 1861); cf. Baur and Dorner, 
Ritter, Neander, Méhler, and Bohringer, in their works before cited, Kahnis, Die Lehre vom heil. Geist., 
Vol. I., 1847, pp. 881 seq., and W. Miller, Kosmol., etc. (see above), pp. 536-560. 

On Celsus compare F. A. Philippi, De Celsi adversarii Christianorwm philosophandi genere, Berlin, 
1836, C. W. J. Bindemann, Ueber Οἱ τι. 8. Schrift gegen die Christen, in the Zeitschrift fiir histor. Theol., 
1842, 6. Baumgarten-Crusius, De scriptoribus saeculi, p. Chr. 11. qui novam relig. impugnarunt, 
Misenae, 1845. 


The old controversy respecting the ‘‘ Platonism of the Church Fathers” is to-day not 
yet in every respect ended. That these Fathers submitted in a measure to the influence 
of the philosophy of Plato is unquestioned; but it is susceptible of dispute how far this 
influence extended, and whether it was direct or indirect. That certain of the Church 
Fathers occupied themselves as scholars with the works of Plato could scarcely account for 
the exertion of more than a secondary influence on the development of Christian dogmas 
and Christian philosophy—an influence which has often been over-rated. Of much greater 
consequence was the indirect influence which Platonism (and Stoicism), in their Jewish- 
Alexandrian form and in their combination and blending with Jewish religious ideas, exerted 
in shaping the doctrine contained in the New Testament writings of Paul and in the fourth 
Gospel, and so, in consequence of the canonical importance of these writings, in determin- 
ing the creed of all Christendom. Subsequently, the ideas thus introduced into Chris- 
tianity, having become common Christian property, served as points of union and departure 
for further studies. 


314 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 
\ 
‘‘ Alexandria, the original home of Gnosis, is also the birth-place of Christian theology, 
which, in its first form, itself aimed to be nothing else than a Christian Gnosis” (Baur, Chr. 
der dret ersten Jahrh., 2d ed., p. 248). The Catechists’ School at Alexandria may have been 
founded at a comparatively early date, upon the model of the schools for Hellenic culture, 
after that, as an ancient tradition has it, the Evangelist Mark had there proclaimed the 
message of Christ. Athenagoras is said to have taught in this school (see above). In 180 
A.D. it was under the direction of Pantznus, who, before his conversion to Christianity, 
had been a Stoic. With him (from 189 on) and after him his pupil Titus Flavius Clemens, 
the Alexandrian, taught there; several of his works have come down to us, in par- 
ticular the λόγος προτρεπτικὸς πρὸς “EAAnvac, in which he argues against Paganism, from 
the absurdities and scandals of the heathen mythology and mysteries, and admonishes 
his readers to come to Christ, and become obedient to the one God and the one Logos of 
God; further, the Paedagogus, containing rules of Christian ethics, and the στρώματα or 
στρωματεῖς in eight books, in which Clement expounds the substance of Christian faith in 
its relation to the doctrines of Greek philosophers and of Christian heretics, and seeks to 
guide his readers from faith to knowledge, to the true Gnosis; but proceeds (as he himself 
acknowledges and as he indicates by his title, which characterizes the work to which it is 
prefixed by comparing it to a carpet of various colors), not with systematic order and con- 
nection, but aphoristically; there is, besides, a shorter work by him under the title: τίς ὁ 
σωζόμενος πλούσιος; Several other writings are mentioned by Eusebius, Hist. Hecl., VI. 13. 
Clement adopts the view of Justin, that to Christianity, as the whole truth, the con- 
ceptions of ante-Christian times are opposed, not as mere errors, but as partial truths. The 
divine Logos, which is everywhere poured out, like the light of the sun (Strom., V. 3), 
enlightened the souls of men from the beginning. It instructed the Jews through Moses 
and the prophets (Paed., I. 7). Among the Greeks, on the contrary, it called forth wise 
men and gave them, through the mediation of the lower angels, whom the Logos had 
appointed to be shepherds of the nations (Strom., VIL 2), philosophy as a guide to 
righteousness (Strom., I. 5; VI. 5). Like Justin, Clement maintains that the philoso- 
phers took much of their doctrine secretly from the Orientals, and, in particular, from 
the religious books of the Jews, which doctrine they then, from desire of renown, falsely 
proclaimed as the result of their own independent investigations, besides falsifying and 
corrupting it (Sirom., I. 1, 11; Paed., II. 1, etc.). Yet some things pertaining to true 
doctrine were really discovered by the Greek philosophers, by the aid of the seed of the 
divine Logos implanted in them (Cohort. VI. 59). Plato was the best of the Greek phi- 
losophers (ὁ πάντα ἄριστος Ἰ]λάτων,. . . οἷον θεοφορούμενος, Paed., III. 11; Strom., V. 8). 
The Christian must choose out that which is true in the writings of the different phi- 
losophers, 7. e., whatever agrees with Christianity (Strom., I. 7; VI. 17). We need the aid 
of philosophy in order to advance from faith (πίστις) to knowledge (γνῶσις). The Gnostic is 
to him who merely believes without knowing as the grown-up man to the child; having out- 
grown the fear of the Old Testament, he has arrived at a higher stage in the divine plan for 
man’s education. Whoever will attain to Gnosis without philosophy, dialectic, and the study 
of nature, is like him who expects to gather grapes without cultivating the grape-vine 
(Strom., I. 9). But the criterium of true science must always be the harmony of the latter 
with faith (Strom., II. 4: κυριώτερον οὖν τῆς ἐπιστήμης ἡ πίστις καί ἐστιν αὐτῆς κριτήριον). 
The Gnostic must raise himself through the world of birth and sin to communion with God 
(Strom., VI. 16). With Gnosis is inseparably joined love, which renders man perfect 
(Strom., VII. 10). Clement regards a positive knowledge of God as impossible; we know 
only what God is not. God is formless and nameless, although we rightly make use of the 
best names in designating him; he is infinite; he is neither genus, nor difference, neither 





es = ee eS 


a ELE 





CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 315 


species, nor individual, neither number, nor accident, nor any thing that can be predicated 
of another thing (Strom., V. 11, 12). Only the Son, who is the power and wisdom of the 
Father, is positively knowable (Strom., V. 1 seq.). In Clement’s utterances concerning 
the Son, the Philonic wavering between the theory of subordination and Modalism (see 
above, p. 231) is not fully overcome.—The Holy Ghost occupies the third place in the divine 
triad; he is the energy of the Word, just as the blood is the energy of the flesh (Strom., 
V.14; Paed., II. 2). 

Of the ethical precepts which Clement lays down in the Paedagogus, those are pecu- 
liarly worthy of notice which relate to marriage. In distinction from Tertullian and 
others, who saw in marriage only a legalized satisfaction of an animal instinct and who 
barely tolerated it, while affirming celibacy to be morally superior to it, Clement appeals in 
favor of the opposite view to the example of several of the Apostles, such as Peter and 
Philip, who were married; he meets the argument drawn from the example of Christ by 
saying that Christ’s bride was the Church, and that he, as the Son of God, occupied an 
altogether exceptional position, and argues that it is necessary to the perfection of man 
that he should live in wedlock, beget children, and not allow himself by the cares which 
they bring him to be drawn away from love to God, but endure and overcome the tempta- 
tions arising from children, wife, domestics, and possessions (Sétrom., III. 1, 6; VII. 12). 
As in marriage, so in the case of riches, every thing depends on a mind capable of preserv- 
ing itself pure and faithful in every situation in life, independent of external goods, and 
master of its own interior freedom (τίς ὁ σωζόμενος πλούσιος ; see, especially, ch. 19). In 
the case of martyrdom, again, the essential thing is not the act of confession and the suf- 
fering, as such, but the constant and successful striving to purify one’s self from sin and 
to endure readily all that the confession of Christianity may render necessary (Strom., IV, 
chs. 9 and 10). 

Origen (born A. D. 185, probably at Alexandria, died in 254, in the reign of Valerian) {Ἢ 
was educated in his early youth by his father Leonidas, and afterward especially by | 
Clement of Alexandria. Familiar with the Scriptures from his youth, he also devoted 
himself, as he came to maturity, to the study of the works of the Greek philosophers, 
especially to the works of Plato, Numenius, Moderatus, Nicomachus, and the Stoics 
Chzremon, Cornutus, Apollophanes, and others; he then attended, though, as it seems, 
not till after his twenty-fifth year, the school of Ammonius Saceas, the founder of Neo- 
Platonism (Porphyr., ap. Euseb., Κ΄. H., VI.19). Origen taught in the School for Cate- 
chists while yet very young, beginning when he was eighteen years old. Compelled in 
the year 232 to quit Alexandria, he lived in his later years at Cawsarea and Tyre. Of 
his writings, which for the most part are explanatory of various parts of the Bible, the 
περὶ ἀρχῶν (concerning the fundamental doctrines)—in which he, first among all Christian 
theologians, undertook to set forth the doctrines of the Christian faith in a systematic 
connection, but which, with the exception of a few fragments preserved by Hieronymus, 
has come down to us only in the Latin translation of Rufinus (or, rather, in the revision 
of Rufinus, for Rufinus altered the original text, so as to soften down what was most 
heterodox in it)—and the work Contra Celswm—a defence of Christian faith against the 
objections of a Platonist—are those which have special philosophical significance. 

Before Origen there existed no system of Christian doctrine. The beginnings of a sys- 
tematic presentation were contained in the Epistle of Paul to the Romans and in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. The necessity of reducing the teachings of the Bible and the doctrines 
developed in the course of the controversies against heretics and non-Christians to a 
systematic form, was first felt by the teachers at the School for Catechists, and they, in 
going to work to meet this necessity, were guided by the baptismal confession and the 


916 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 


Regula Fidei. In the writings of Clement the subjects of his Gnosts are loosely combined, 
the treatises disclose no plan followed in detail, they are only labors preparatory to a sys 
tem. Setting out with these materials, Origen laid the foundation of a well-ordered 
system of Christian dogmas. Yet his order was not very exact. The gain of a systematic 
doctrinal form was, however, not secured without substantial loss. The doctrines relating 
to the pre-mundane existence of God being placed first, in the regular scholastic order, 
concealed those living germs seated in man’s religious feeling or contained in the history 
of religion, which might otherwise have influenced beneficially the historical development 
of Christian doctrine, and the doctrine of Soteriology was left comparatively undeveloped. 
Origen says: “The Apostles taught only what was necessary; many doctrines were not 
announced by them with perfect distinctness; they left the more precise determination and 
demonstration of many dogmas to the disciples of science, who were to build up a scientific 
system on the basis of the given articles of faith” (De Princ., Praef., 3 seq.). The principle 
that a systematic exposition should begin with the consideration of that which is naturally 
first, is expressly enounced by Origen (Zom. in Joan., X. 178), where, in an allegorical inter- 
pretation of the eating of the fishes, he says: in eating, one should begin with the head, ἢ, e., 
one should set out from the highest and most fundamental dogmas concerning the heavenly, 
and should stop with the feet, ὦ. e., should end with those doctrines which relate to that 
realm of existence which is farthest removed from its heavenly source, whether it be to 
that which is most material or to the subterranean, or to evil spirits and impure demons. 
The order of presentation in the four books respecting fundamental doctrines is (ac- 
cording to the outline given by Redepenning, Orig., 11. 276) as follows: ‘At the com- 
mencement is placed the doctrine of God, the eternal source of all existence, as point of 
departure for an exposition in which the knowledge of the essence of God and of the 
unfoldings of that essence leads on to the genesis of the eternal in the world, viz.: the 
created spirits, whose fall first occasioned the creation of the coarser material world. This 
material is without difficulty arranged around the ecclesiastical doctrines of the Father, 
Son, and Spirit, of the creation, the angels, and the fall of man. All this is contained in 
the first book of Origen’s work on fundamental doctrines. In the second book we set foot 
upon the earth as it now is; we see it arising out of an ante-mundane though not abso- 
lutely eternal matter, in time, in which it is to lead its changing existence until the restora- 
tion and emancipation of the fallen spirits. Into this world comes the Son of God, sent by 
the God of the Old Testament, who is no other than the Father of Jesus Christ; we hear 
of the incarnation of the Son, of the Holy Ghost as he goes forth from the Son to enter 
into the hearts of men, of the psychical in man in distinction from the purely spiritual in 
him, of the purification and restoration of the psychical man by judgment and punishment, 
and of eternal salvation. In virtue of the inalienable freedom belonging to the spirit, it 
fights its way upward in the face of the evil powers of the spiritual world and against 
temptations from within, supported by Christ himself and by the means of grace, 7. e., by all 
the gifts and operations of the Holy Ghost. This freedom, and the process by which man 
becomes free, are described in the third book. The fourth book is distinct from the rest 
and independent, as containing the doctrine of the basis on which the doctrine of the pre- 
ceding books rests, viz., the revelation made in Holy Scripture” (whereas later dogmatists 
have been accustomed to place this doctrine before the other contents of their systems). 
Of the special doctrines of Origen, the following are those most worthy of notice. In 
opposition to the Gnostics, he, like Ireneeus and others, holds it to be apostolic doctrine 
that God, who created the world out of nothing, is at once just and good, the author of the 
Old and New Testaments, the giver of the law and the Father of Jesus Christ, who was 
born of the Virgin through the influence of the Holy Ghost, and became man by his own 








» 


CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 317 


voluntary self-humiliation (De Princ. I. 4). He conceives God as a purely spiritual es- 
sence, not fire, nor light, nor breath, but an absolutely immaterial unit (μονάς or évac, De 
Princ., I. 96 seq.). Only on the supposition that he is immaterial can God be conceived as 
absolutely unchangeable, for all that is material is mutable, divisible, and perishable (De 
Princ., 11. 184). The depths of the divine wisdom and knowledge are unsearchable; the 
entire fullness of the divine light is accessible to no creature (Zom. in Jo., II. 80 seq.). Yet 
God is not without measure and limit, he is self-limiting; the absolutely unlimited would be 
unable to conceive itself (Jom. in Matth., XIII. 569). God’s omnipotence is limited by his 
goodness and wisdom (C. Ceéls., III. 493). The Son is always begotten of God the Father, 
in the same manner in which light always begets its own lustre, or as the will proceeds 
outward from the mind, without causing a division of the latter into parts, ἃ e., without 
being separated from the mind (De Princ., I. 110 seq.). In all which the Father is and 
has the Son participates, and in this sense a community of essence may be predicated of 
him and the Father; yet he is (De Orat., 222) not only as an individual (κατὰ ὑποκείμενον) 
another being than the Father, a second God (C. Cels., V. 608: δεύτερος θεός), but he is also 
inferior to him in essence (κατ᾽ οὐσίαν), in so far as his existence is conditioned and depends 
on that of the Father; he is θεός, but not, like the Father, ὁ θεός, he knows the Father, 
but his knowledge of the Father is less perfect than is the Father’s knowledge of himself 
(Tom. in Joh., XXXII. 449). As being a copy, he is inferior to the original, and is so 
related to the Father as we are to him (Fragm. de princ., I. 4); at least in that measure in 
which the Son and the Spirit tower above all creatures, does the Father tower above 
themselves (Jom. in Jo., XIII. 235). In relation to the world, the Son is a prototype, 
ἰδέα ἰδεῶν (C. Cels., VI. 64). In the unfolding of the divine unity into plurality, the Son 
is the first term, the Spirit the second, standing next to the created world, yet himself 
belonging to the Godhead as the last element or term in the adorable Trinity (Zom. in Jo., 
VI. 133: τῆς προσκυνητῆς τριάδος) The Spirit receives all which he is and has through 
the Son, as the latter also receives all from the Father; he is the mediator of our com- 
munion with God and the Son (De Princ., IV. 374). Later in order than the Holy Ghost, 
but not later in time, is the entire world of spirits, created by the will of the Father, and 
numbering more than we can calculate, though not absolutely innumerable (De Princ., IT. 
219; Fragm. de princ., II. 6). The time will come when all spiritual beings will possess 
the knowledge of God in the same perfect measure in which the Son possesses it, and all 
shall be sons of God in the same manner in which now the Only-begotten alone is (Tom. 
in Jo., I. 17), being themselves deified through participation in the deity of the Father 
(Tom. in Jo, ΤΙ. 50: μετοχῇ τῆς ἐκείνου θεότητος θεοποιούμενοι), so that then God will be all 
in all (De Princ., III. 318, 321). 

The goodness of God could never remain inactive nor his omnipotence be without 
objects for his government, hence the creation of the world cannot have been begun in any 
given moment of time, but must be conceived as without beginning (De Princ., III. 308). 
There have been no eons in which no worlds existed. This present world has, nevertheless, 
had a commencement, and is subject to decay, and the duration of each world-son, and 
therefore (since, according to Origen, the number of the eons is obviously finite) time itself, 
is limited; God could not foreknow all things if the duration of the world was unlimited 
(Tom. in Matth., XIII. 569). God did not find matter already in existence and then merely 
communicate shape and form to it, but he himself created matter; otherwise a providence, 
older than God, must have provided for the possibility of his expressing his thoughts in 
material forms, or a happy accident must have played the réle of providence (De Princ., 11. 
164). God, who in himself is spaceless, is by his working power everywhere present in 
the world, just as the architect is present in his work, or as the soul, as organ of sensa- 


318 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, AND ORIGEN. 


tion, is extended throughout the body; only that which is evil is not filled by his presence 
(De Orat., p. 233; De Princ., 11. 172). God comes down to men, not in space, but by his 
providence (C. Cels., V. 586). The created human spirit, having turned away from the 
fullness of the divine life, was placed in a material environment, but is free to choose 
between the good and the bad; the faculty of willing and the power which men may use 
for good, are the gift of God, but man’s decisions are his own work. Yet even in this God 
affords us his aid through his Holy Spirit; each of our actions results from a mixture of 
our own volition and of divine assistance (De Princ., III.; In Ps., p. 672; In Matth., XII. 
561). Evil is the turning away of the creature from the fullness of true being to empti- 
ness and nothingness, hence a privation; life in sin is a life of death (De Princ., I. 109). 
The cause of evil is neither God nor matter, but that free act of turning away from 
God, which God did not command, but only did not prevent (C. Cels., VII. 742). In the 
future world there will be rewards and punishments, but at last evil itself must become 
ancillary to good; the consequences of evil cannot endure until after the end of the world; 
at the end of all things will take place the Apokatastasis, the restoration of all things to 
unity with God (De Princ., III. 312 seq.). The evil spirits, at their head the devil, tempt 
us as much as is necessary that we may prove ourselves (C. Cels., VI. 666); but even they 
are corrigible and shall be redeemed (De Princ., I. 156; JII. 233). Good angels stand at 
our side; at last love brought the Logos himself down to us, and led him to assume not 
only a human body, but also a complete, rational, human soul (De Princ., Il. 6; IV. 32), 
To numerous ages of the world the Logos did not appear himself; in the present zon. 
which is already drawing near to its end, he has come down as a Redeemer, to lead all 
things back to God (De Princ., II. 17). The divine Logos, mightier than sin, is the world- 
redeeming power; through him the Almighty God, for whom nothing is irretrievably lost, 
will lead all men back to full and blessed life (De Princ., I. 109, 324). The object of 
future punishments is purification; as by fire, the evil in us will be extirpated more quickly 
in those who are purest, less quickly in the impure; the worst sinners will continue in 
these punishments, as in their hell, till the end of time; after which God will be all in all, 
being the measure and the form of all the motions of the souls, who only feel and behold 
him (De Princ., 111. 311). 

The Holy Scriptures were inspired by God, and contain his word, or his revelations. 
The doctrine contained in them has already made its way as revealed truth among all 
peoples, whereas the philosophical systems of men, with all their proofs, have not been 
able to gain the acceptance of a single people, much less of all nations. That the Scrip- 
tures are inspired is testified not only by the fact of their wide propagation, but also by 
the impression which we receive in reading them; for we then feel ourselves touched by 
the breath of the Holy Ghost. These Scriptures contain pre-eminently (προηγουμένως) 
matter of instruction, and inform us respecting the formation of the world and other mys- 
teries; in the next place, they furnish precepts for our conduct. The Gospel and the 
Apostolic Epistles stand in no respect behind the Law and the Prophets. The Old Testa- 
ment is unveiled in the New. Yet the New Testament is itself not the end and consum- 
mation of the revelations of God, but it is related to the complete truth as the Old 
Testament is to it; it awaits its unveiling at the second coming of Christ, and is only a 
shadow and image of those things which shall be after the end of the present period of the 
world; it is temporary and not immutable, and will one day be changed into an eternal 
Gospel (De Princ., 111. 327; IV. 1 seq.; 61 seq.; 364). Even a Paul and a Peter descried 
only a small portion of the truth (Hom. in Jerem., VIII. 174 seq.; Tom. in Epist. ad Rom., 
V. 545). The understanding of the secret meaning of the Holy Scriptures or their alle- 
gorical interpretation is a gracious gift of the Holy Ghost, the greatest of all his gifts; 





Ὁ Ὁ» 





: MINUTIUS FELIX, ARNOBIUS, AND LACTANTIUS. 319 
Origen calls it, not—after the manner of his predecessors, including Clement— Gnosis 
(which designates for him only an inferior stage of knowledge), but Wisdom (7 θεία σοφία, 
C. Cels., VI. 639; Sel. in Ps., p. 568; χάρισμα τῆς σοφίας or λόγου καὶ σοφίας, Sel. in Maitth., 
p. 835). Origen designates the allegorical method of interpretation in opposition to the 
ordinary method of interpretation or interpretation proper, as the spiritual in opposition to 
the somatic; from it he occasionally distinguishes also moral interpretation, which he terms 
psychical (De Princ., IV. 59). (In reality, allegorical interpretation amounted in practice, 
in the case of all those passages in which the biblical writer did not himself intend to 
speak allegorically—which intention, it is true, the Alexandrians always imputed to him, 
when the literal sense failed to edify themselyes—only to a species of aphoristical philoso- 
phizing on the occasion of Bible passages.) 

The eclectic Platonist, Celsus, incorrectly supposed by Origen to be an Epicurean (and 
therefore to be distinguished from the Epicurean of the same namé who lived about 
170 A. D., and is mentioned by Lucian in the Pseudomantis) wrote about the year 200 a 
λόγος ἀληθής against the Christians, in which he combats Christianity, partly from the 
Jewish and partly from his own philosophical stand-point, reducing its historical basis to 
an abortive attempt at insurrection, and opposing to the Christian idea of forbearing love 
the idea of justice; to faith in the redemption of humanity, faith in an eternal, rational 
order of the universe; to the doctrine of God incarnate, the idea of the remoteness of God, 
whose influence on earthly things is exerted only indirectly, and to faith in the resurrec- 
tion of the body, the doctrine of the nothingness of matter and of the future existence of 
the soul alone. Celsus finds the cause of the wide acceptance of Christianity in the fear 
and hope excited among the uncultured masses, who were incapable of rising above sen- 
suous conceptions, by threats and promises with reference to their future condition. In 
return, Origen, in his reply, written at the request of his friend Ambrosius, asserts the 
reasonableness and demonstrableness of the Christian faith. He finds his proofs of Chris- 
tianity in the fulfilled prophecies of the Old Testament (Contra Celswm, I. 366), in the 
miracles which were daily performed on the sick and on persons possessed by evil spirits 
through the reading of the Gospel (ib., I. 321 et al.), in the victorious extension of Chris- 
tianity and its sanctifying power, and in the conspicuous purity of the Christian com- 
munities in the midst of general corruption (ἰ6., I. 323; III. 466). Origen then seeks to 
establish the single dogmas of Christianity in substantially the same manner as in the περι 
ἀρχῶν. The right of the Christian communities to exist, against the will of the state, is 
founded by Origen on the law of nature, which is given by God and is higher than the 
written law (C. Cels., V. 604). 

The later adherents of Orthodoxy, the form and character of which were fundamentally 
influenced by the doctrine of Origen (see above, § 82, end) recognized the importance of 
the services rendered by him to Christianity, and yet at the same time opposed him, 
receiving with favor his apologetical, but rejecting his systematic, work, while, on the other 
side, Arians, and afterward Pelagians, appealed to him as an authority. In his writings 
lay combined (as in more recent times in the writings and views of Schleiermacher) the 
germs of opposed theological systems, which at a later period were to attain to an inde- 
pendent development. The same Justinian who (in A. D. 529) broke up the school of the 
Neo-Platonists, condemned (about 540) Origenism in nine anathemas. 


§ 84. While Christological speculation was developed chiefly by 
Hellenistic theologians, the Latin teachers of the Church gave promi- 
nence more especially to the general basis of the Christian doctrine, 


320 MINUTIUS FELIX, ARNOBIUS, AND LACTANTIUS. 


as contained in the belief in God and immortality, as also to anthro- 
pological and ethical questions. Minutius Felix, a Roman attorney, 
defended, without touching on Christology, the belief of the Chris- 
tians in the unity of God. He sought to show that this belief was 
held by the most distinguished philosophers ; he combated sharply the 
polytheism of the popular faith, as opposed to reason and the moral 
sense, and maintained, against various objections, the Christian doc 
trines of the perishableness of the world, the imperishability of the 
soul, and the resurrection of the body. With less elegance of form, but 
greater completeness of detail, and yet often more superficially than 
thoroughly, the same theme is handled by Arnobius, who also pays 
some attention to the Christological question, attempting to prove the 
deity of Christ by his miracles. He holds the belief in God’s exist- 
ence to be innate. With Justin and Irenzus, he denies the natural 
immortality of the soul, whose nature he regards as intermediate be- 
tween the divine and material, and he opposes the Platonic argu- 
ments for the pre-existence and post-existence of the soul, reserving 
his favor only for the theological and moral argument. The rheto- 
rician Lactantius unites in his theologico-philosophical writings agree- 
ableness of form and Ciceronian purity of style with a tolerably 
comprehensive and exact knowledge of his subject-matter; yet his 
always clear and facile presentation sometimes lacks in thoroughness 
and profundity. He sets the Christian doctrine as the revealed truth 
over-against the polytheistic religion and the ante-Christian phi- 
losophy, both of which he makes war upon as being false and per- 
nicious, although confessing that no opinion is without some elements 
of truth; but affirming that he only can rightly point out these ele- 
ments who has been taught of God. The union of true wisdom with 
true religion is the end which he seeks to further by his writings. 
The rejection of polytheism, the recognition of the unity of God, and 
Christology, are for him the successive stages of religious knowledge. 
True virtue rests on true religion; its end is not itself, but eternal 
blessedness. 


The apologetical work of Minutius Felix was first published with the work of Arnobius Adv. Gentes 
(Rome, 1543), it being supposed to be the last (eighth) book of the latter work; under its proper title 
of Octavius, and as a work of Minutius Felix, it was first edited by Franz Balduin (Heidelberg, 1560), then 
in the edition of Arnobius (Rome, 1583, etc.), and in more recent times by Lindner (Langensalza, 1773), 
Russwurm (Hamburg, 1824), Muralt (Zirich, 1836), Liibkert (with translation and commentary, Leipsic, 
1836), by France. Oehler, in Gersdorf’s Bibl. Patrum EKecles. Lat. sel. (Leipsic, 1847), and by J. Kayser 
(Paderborn, 1863), and finally by Halm, Vienna, 1867 (see above, p. 263). 

The work of Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, was first printed at Rome in 1543; more recently it has been 
published at Leipsic, 1816, edited by Joh. Con. Orelli, at Halle, 1844, edited by Hildebrandt, and in 





ΚΕ Cn a te! A el 


iS 


MINUTIUS FELIX, ARNOBIUS, AND LACTANTIUS. 921 


Gersdorf’s Bibl. patr. eccl. Lat., Vol. ΧΤ]., edited by Franz Oehler, Leipsic, 1846. On Arnobius, see E. 
Klussmann, Arnod. τι. Lucretius, in the Philologus, Vol. XXVI. 1867, pp. 362-366. 

The works of Lactantius, of which the Institut. Div. were the first to appear in print (Subiaco, 1465 seq., 
Rome, 1470 seq., ete.), have been printed very often; more recent editions are those by J. L. Binemana 
(Leipsic, 1739), J. B. Le Brun and Nic. Lenglet-Dufresnoy (Paris, 1748), O. F. Fritzsche, in Gersdorf's Bidt, 
Vols. X. and XI. (Leipsic, 1842-44), and in J. P. Migne’s Bibi. (Paris, 1844). 


The short work of Minutius Felix (who lived probably before the end of the second 
century, and in some of his ideas follows in the path of Tertullian), marked by graceful- 
ness of style and mildness of spirit, contains an account of the conversion of the heathen 
Cecilius by the Christian Octavius. Czcilius urges, that in view of our uncertainty re- 
specting all supra-terrestrial things, men should not with vain self-conceit allow them- 
selves to judge respecting them, but that men should retain and respect, in regard to them, 
the traditions of their ancestors, and that, if they will philosophize, they should confine 
themselves, like Socrates, to the things which relate to man, while in relation to other 
things they find, with Socrates ana the Academics, their true wisdom in the knowledge of 
their ignorance. Quod supra est, nihil ad nos. Confessae imperitiae summa prudentia est. In 
reply to this argumentation (which, of course, was equally good for men of all religions, 
including Christians, when their religion should once have become dominant and traditional), 
Octavius answers, first, by pointing out the contradiction involved in the combination of 
theoretical skepticism with actual adherence to a traditional religion. Octavius approves 
the requirement of self-knowledge, but asserts, in opposition to the affirmations of Cecilius 
respecting the incognoscibility of the transcendent, that in the universe all things are so 
intimately united to each other, that the human cannot be known without the divine (ut 
nisi divinitatis rationem diligenter excusseris, nescias humanitatis). Besides, continues Octa- 
yius, our knowledge of God is not so uncertain; such knowledge is our prerogative, as 
beings endowed with speech and reason, and it results for us from our observation of the 
order of nature, and especially from our observation of the adaptation of means to ends in the 
structure of all organized beings, and, above all, in man (Quid enim potest esse tam apertum, 
tam confessum, tamque perspicuum, quum oculos in coelum sustuleris et quae sunt infra cireaque 
lustraveris, quam esse aliqguod numen praestantissimae mentis, quo omnis natura mspiretur, 
moveatur, alatur, gubernetur 2—Ipsa praecipue formae nostrae pulchritudo Deum Jatetur arti- 
ficem; nihil in homine membrorum est, quod non et necessitatis causa sit et decoris. Nec 
universitati solummodo Deus, sed et partibus consulit). The unity of the order of nature proves 
the unity of the Deity. God is infinite, almighty, and eternal; before the world he was to 
himself in the place of the world (Ante mundum sibi ipse fuit pro mundo). He 1s fully known 
only to himself, being exalted beyond the reach of the senses and the understanding of man. 
On account of his unity he needs no peculiar or specifying name; the word God is sufficient. 
Even to the popular consciousness the intuition of the unity of the divine is not foreign (si 
Deus dederit, etc.); it is expressly acknowledged by nearly all philosophers. Even Epicurus, 
who denied to the gods activity, though not existence, saw a unity in nature; Aristotle 
recognizes a unique divine power, the Stoics teach the doctrine of providence, Plato speaks 
in the Timaeus almost like a Christian, when he calls God the father and architect of the 
world, adding that he is difficult to be known and is not to be publicly proclaimed; for the 
Christians, too, regard God as the father of all things, and they proclaim him publicly only 
then, when they are called on to bear witness to his truth. In this view it may be held 
either that the Christians are philosophers, or that the philosophers were already Chris- 
tian. The gods of the heathen are deified kings or inventors. The faith of our ancestors 
should not determine our own; the ancients were credulous and took pleasure in miracu- 
ous narratives, which we recognize as fables; for if such things as are narrated lad taken 

21 


322 MINUTIUS FELIX, ARNOBIUS, AND LACTANTIUS. 


place, they would also be taking place to-day; but they did not take place, because it was 
impossible that they should. It is the poets who most prejudice the interests of truth, 
when they ensnare us in their sweet illusions; Plato was right in banishing them; the 
myths of the heathen religions are lenient toward vice. Impure demons, assuming the title 
of Gods, have thus secured the worship of men. The true God is omnipresent: uwbique non 
tantum nobis proximus, sed infusus est; non solum in oculis ejus, sed et in sinu vivimus. The 
world is perishable, man is immortal. God will renew our bodies, just as in the actual 
economy of nature all things are periodically renewed; the belief that the soul alone is 
immortal is a half-truth; the doctrine of the transmigration of souls is a fable, though 
even in this doctrine there is contained a foreshadowing of truth. It is right that a better 
lot should fall to the Christians than to the heathen, for not to know God is alone suffi- 
cient to justify punishment, while the knowledge of God is a ground of pardon; besides, 
the moral lite of the Christians is better than that of the heathen. The doctrine of divine 
predestination is not in contradiction with the justice of God nor with human freedom; for 
God sees beforehand what will be the characters of men, and determines their fate accord- 
ingly; fate is only the sentence of God (Quid enim aliud est fatum, quam quod de wnoquoque 
nostrum Deus fatus est?). Sufferings serve to test the quality of Christians and to confirm 
them in their contests with adverse powers. They are right in refraining from worldly 
pleasures, which are of doubtful character in moral and religious regards. 

In the work written soon after 300 by Arnobius, the African, ‘against the Heathen” 
(Adversus Gentes), the polytheism of the popular faith is opposed in a manner similar to 
that adopted in the work of Minutius, though with greater fullness. Arnobius denounces 
polytheism as absurd and immoral, and defends the doctrine of the one, eternal God, in 
whom, he says, the Hellenic gods themselves, in case they existed, must have had their 
origin, and who therefore is not to be identified with Zeus, the son of Saturn. Arnobius 
energetically rejects the allegorical interpretation of the myths concerning the gods. The 
doubt whether the highest God exists at all he considers (I. 31) unworthy of refutation, 
since the belief mn God is inborn in all men; even the brute animals and the plants, if they 
could speak, would proclaim God as the Lord of the universe (I. 33). God is infinite and 
eternal, the place and space of all things (I. 31). In distinction from Minutius Felix, how- 
ever, Arnobius seeks also to answer the reproach of those who affirmed that the gods were 
angry with the Christians, not because they worshiped the eternal God, but because they 
held a man who was crucified as a criminal to be a God (I. 36 seq.). To this Arnobius 
replies that Christ might justly be called God on account of the benefits conferred by him 
on the human race; he was, however, also God in reality, as appears from his miraculous 
works and his power to transform the opinions and characters of men. Arnobius lays 
very great weight on the argument from miracles. Philosophers, he says (II. 11), like 
Plato, Cronius, and Numenius (cf. above, pp. 237-238), whom the pagans believe, were 
perhaps morally pure, and learned in the sciences, but they could not, like Christ, work 
miracles; they could not calm the sea, heal the blind, etc., and consequently we must regard 
Christ as higher than they and give more credence to his affirmations concerning hidden 
things than to theirs. In respect of terrestrial and supra-terrestrial things, all are compelled 
to believe; the Christian believes Christ (II. 8 seq.). It was necessary that Christ should 
appear on earth as a man, because, if he had come down to it in his original nature, he 
could not have been seen by men nor have accomplished the objects of his mission. 
Arnobius combats, with Justin, the Platonic doctrine that the human soul is by nature 
immortal, and particularly the opinion that knowledge is reminiscence; in answer to the 
argument brought forward in the Meno, he says that the slave who answered correctly the 
geometrical questions of Socrates, did so, not owing to a knowledge of the subject already 








MINUTIUS FELIX, ARNOBIUS, AND LACTANTIUS. 323 


existing in him, but in consequence of intelligent reflection (non rerum scientia sed intelli- 
gentia) and of the methodical manner in which the questions were put to him (II. 24). A 
man who from his birth should have lived in complete solitude would show no signs of 
intellect and by no means be filled with notions of supra-terrestrial things perceived in a 
previous life. Equally false is the opinion of Epicurus that the souls of men perish; if 
that were so, it would be not only the greatest error, but foolish blindness, to restrain the 
passions, since there would be no future reward awaiting us for so violent a labor (II. 30). 
The immortality, which heathen philosophers infer from the supposed divine nature of the 
soul, is regarded by the Christians as a gift of God’s grace (II. 32). The true worship of 
God consists, not in bringing offerings, but in having right views concerning the Deity 
(opinio religionem facit et recta de divis mens, VII., 51 Or.). 

At about the same time when Arnobius wrote, Firmianus Lactantius, the rhetorician 
and Christian convert, composed his Institutiones Divinae; of this work he prepared an 
abridgment: Epitome Divinarum Institutionwm ad Pentadiwm fratrem (in which he says that 
Christ was born, in round numbers, 300 years before then, ch. 43). Other extant works of 
his are: Liber de opificio Dei ad Demetrianum; De ira Dei liber; De mortibus persecutorum 
liber ; Fragmenta and Carmina. Jerome (Cat., ch. 80) calls Lactantius a pupil of Arno- 
bius; yet there is no evidence in his writings of his having stood in such a relation 
jo Arnobius. In the Inst. Div. (V. 1-4) he mentions particularly as his predecessors Ter- 
tullian, Minutius Felix, and Cyprian (who lived 200-258 a. D., and labored especially for 
the unity of the Church, and to whom belongs the dictum: habere jam non potest Deum 
patrem, qui ecclesiam non habet matrem), but not Arnobius, and the content of his work 
shows also, apparently, no signs of Arnobianic influence. Tertullian did not satisfy him 
in the matter of form; of Minutius Felix he makes laudatory mention, saying that his work 
shows that, if he had devoted himself solely to the subject of which he treated, he would 
have been able fully to meet all its requirements; but Cyprian, he says, uses language 
that is too mystical for the apologetic purpose; he fails in his method of demonstration, 
since his appeal to the authority of the biblical writings could carry no conviction to un- 
believers. Lactantius evidently composed his Jnstitutiones and also his Epitome of them at 
a time when Christianity had not yet received public recognition; the addresses to Con- 
stantine as the protector of the Christians were inserted in his principal work either by 
himself or by others at a later epoch. The work De opificio Dei grounds the belief in 
God’s existence on the adaptations seen in the forms of the organic world, in pointing out 
which Lactantius goes into very minute details. In the Jnstitutiones Lactantius proposes 
not only to demonstrate the right of Christianity to exist, but also to communicate instruc- 
tion in the Christian doctrine itself (IV. 1 seq.; V. 4), and to combine the wisdom whereby 
polytheism is destroyed, and the true God known and, in his quality of Father, loved, 
with the religion which worships him as Lord of all; but knowledge, he says, must pre- 
cede worship. The highest good for man is neither pleasure, which the animals also 
enjoy, nor even virtue, which is only the way to it, but religion. For humanity is synony- 
mous with justice, but justice is piety, and piety is the recognition of the fatherhood of 
God (Inst., III. 11 seq.; IV. 4; V.1). Lactantius presupposes in the Inst. Div. (what in 
the De opific. Dei he demonstrates in full), as something scarcely ever doubted, that the 
rational order of the world proves the existence of a divine providence (Jnst., I. 2: nemo 
est enim tam rudis, tam ferts moribus, qui non, oculos suos in coelum tollens, tametsi nesciat, 
eujus det providentia regatur hoc omne quod cernitur, aliquam tamen esse intelligat ex ipsa 
rerum magnitudine, motu, dispositione, constantia, utilitate, pulchritudine, temperatione, nec 
posse fiert quin id, quod mirabili ratione constat, consilio majori aliquo sit instructum). THe 
then turns to the demonstration of the unity of God, which he infers from the perfection 


824 MINUTIUS FELIX, ARNOBIUS, AND LACTANTIUS. 


of God as the eternal Spirit (/ast., I. 3: Deus autem, qui est aeterna mens, ex omni utique 
parte perfectae consummataeque virtutis est; . . . virtutis autem perfecta natura in eo potius est, 
in quo totum est, quam in eo, in quo pars exigua de toto est; Deus vero, st perfectus est, ut esse 
debet, non potest esse nisi wunus, ut in eo stnt omnia). A plurality of Gods would involve the 
divisibility of the divine power, from which its perishableness would follow. Several Gods, 
if they existed, might will opposite things, whence contentions would arise between them, 
which would destroy the order of the world; only on the condition of a single providence 
existing and controlling all the parts of the world, can the whole subsist; hence the world 
must necessarily be directed by the will of one being (I. 3). As the human body is goy- 
erned by one spirit, so the world by God (ibid.). Beings that must obey the one God are 
not Gods (ibid.). To the unity of God bear witness not only prophets (I. 4), but also poets 
and philosophers—not as though the latter had rightly known the truth, but because the 
power of truth is so great that it enlightens men even against their will (I. 5); no philo- 
sophical school is altogether without elements of truth (VII. 1). In his appeal to the 
philosophical witnesses to the unity of God, Lactantius evidently follows in substance 
Minutius Felix; both of them draw their information chiefly from Cicero’s work De 
Natura Deorum; but Lactantius is far from agreeing with Minutius Felix in his favorable 
judgment of philosophers, for he affirms, with Tertullian, that heathen religion and phi- 
losophy are each false and misleading, and places them in contrast with the truth revealed 
by God (I. 1; III. 1 οὐ pass.), employing against the philosophers the biblical proposition 
that the wisdom of men is foolishness with God. The third book of the Jnst. is expressly 
devoted to showing the nullity of philosophy (philosophiam quoque ostendere quam inanis et 
faisa sit, ut omni errore sublato veritas patefacta clarescat, III. 2. Philosophia quaerit sapien- 
tiam, non tpsa sapientia est, ibid.). Philosophy must be either knowledge or opinion. Knowl- 
edge (and here the philosophical knowledge of nature, natural philosophy, is chiefly meant) 
is unattainable by man; he cannot draw it out of his own mind, since the power to do this 
belongs only to God and not to man (mortalis natura non capit scientiam nist quae veniat 
extrinsecus) ; we know not the causes of things, as Socrates and the Academies rightly teach. 
Hence not philosophy, but revelation, conducts to the knowledge of truth. Dialectic is 
useless (III. 13). In Ethics the opinions of philosophers differ in the same manner as in 
Physics. In order to choose from among them, we must be already wise, which yet we 
were to learn to be from the philosophers; moreover, the skeptical Academic admonishes 
us never to believe in any school, whereby he evidently destroys even the possibility of our 
believing in his own doctrines. What remains, therefore, but to fly to the giver of true 
wisdom? After his refutation of false religion and philosophy, Lactantius turns to the 
exposition of the Christian doctrine, and attempts to show that God so ordered all things 
from the beginning, that as the end of the world (ὦ e., the expiration of the 6,000 years to 
which its duration was limited) drew near, it was necessary that the Son of God should 
come down to the earth and suffer, in order to build up a temple for God and lead men to 
righteousness. He founds the belief in Christ as the Logos and Son of God mainly on the 
testimony of the prophets (Jnst., IV.). Father and Son are one God, because their spirit 
and will are one; the Father cannot be truly worshiped without the Son (IV. 29). (The 
Holy Ghost is not recognized by Lactantius as a third person in the Godhead, but only as 
the spirit of the Father and the Son.) The temple of God erected by Christ is the Catholic 
Church (Jnst., IV. 30). Justice consists in piety and equity; piety is its source, equity, 
whieh rests on the recognition of the essential equality of men, is its power and energy 
(V. 14). Both the source and the power of justice remained hid for the philosophers, since 
they had not the true religion, but to the Christians they have become known by revela- 
tion (V. 15). Virtue is the fulfilling of the divine law, or the true worship, which consists, 








GREGORY OF NYSSA, AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 325 


not in sacrifices, but in pure intentions and in the fulfillment of all obligations toward God 
and man (Jnst., VI.). Not the suppression of the passions, nor their restraint, but the 
right employment of them, is the part of virtue (VI. 16); even God is sometimes angry 
(De Ira Dei). Justice has been clothed by God in the semblance of folly, in order thus to 
point to the mysterious nature of true religion; justice would indeed be folly if no future 
reward was reserved for virtue. Plato and Aristotle had the laudable intention of defend- 
ing virtue; but they were unable to accomplish their aim, and their exertions remained 
vain and useless, because they were unacquainted with the doctrine of salvation, which is 
contained in the Holy Scriptures; they erroneously imagined that virtue was to be sought 
on its own account, and that it had its reward in itself alone (Jnst., V. 18: gui sacra- 
mentum hominis ignorant ideoque ad hanc vitam temporalem referunt omnia, quanta sit vis 
justitiae scire non possunt; nam et quum de virtute disputant quamvis intelligant aerumnis ac 
miserits esse plenissimam, tamen expetendam ajunt sua causa; ejus enim praemia quae sunt 
aeterna et immortalia, nullo modo vident; sic rebus omnibus ad hane praesentem vitam relatis 
virtutem plane ad stultitiam redigunt. Inst., V. 18: virtus et mercedem suam Deo judice acci- 
piet et vivet ac semper vigebit; quae si tollas, nihil potest in vita hominum tam inutile, tam 
stultum videri esse quam virtus. Inst., VI. 9: nec aliter virtus quum per se dura sit, haberi 
pro bono potest, quam si acerbitatem suam maximo bono penset). In this manner Lactantius 
arrives at the conclusion that the soul (whose existence is the result, not of the act of 
generation, but of divine creation, De Opif. Det, 19) is immortal, and divinely-ordered 
rewards await the virtuous in the future world (Jnst., V. 18), without which virtue would 
be useless. The world exists for man, man for immortality, and immortality for the eternal 
worship of God. The conviction of man’s immortality Lactantius seeks to justify, first, on 
the ground of the testimony of the Scriptures, and then by arguments deemed sufficient to 
compel belief (Jnst., VI. 1 seq.). The arguments which Plato borrows from the automatism 
and the intellectuality of the soul seem to him insufficient, since other authorities can be 
cited against them (Jnst., VII. 8). The soul can exist without the body, for is not God incor- 
poreal? It will continue to live after the death of the body, since it is capable of knowing 
and worshiping God, the Eternal; without immortality virtue would not have that worth 
which it in fact possesses, nor would vice receive the punishment which befits it (Jnst., VII. 
10 seq.). Our souls, when raised, wili be clothed by God with bodies (VII. 23). First, 
the righteous will arise to beatific life; at the second resurrection the unrighteous or un- 


believing will be reawakened, and that to eternal torments (VII. 26). 
σ 


oe = 


SECOND SECTION. 
Tuer Parristic PuttosopHy AFTER THE CounciL or NICE. 


§ 85. After the Christian religion had attained to recognized inde- 
pendence and supremacy in the Roman state, and the fundamental 
dogmas had been ecclesiastically sanctioned (at the Council of Nice, 
A. D. 825), Christian thought directed itself, on the one hand, to the 
more special, internal elaboration of tke doctrines which had now 


820 GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 


beea defined and agreed upon in general terms, and, on the other, to 
the work of demonstrating them on grounds either of Christian or of 
philosophical theology. The contests between heresy and orthodoxy 
awakened the productive energy of thought. Philosophico-theologi- 
cal speculation was most cultivated in the period next following by 
the school of Origen. The most prominent representative of this school 
is Gregory of Nyssa (831-394), the first, who (after the defence, chiefly 
by Athanasius himself, of the Christological dogma against the Arians 
and Sabellians) sought to establish by rational considerations the whole 
complex of orthodox doctrines, though, at the same time, he did not 
neglect the argument drawn from biblical passages. In his scientific 
method Gregory follows Origen; but he adopted the doctrine of the 
latter, only in so far as it agreed with the orthodox dogmas ; he com- 
bats expressly such theorems as that of the pre-existence of the soul 
before the body, and deviates from the approved faith of the Church 
only in his leaning toward the theory of a final restoration of all things 
to communion with God. He pays particular attention to the problems 
of the divine Trinity and of the resurrection of man to renewed life. 
Gregory regards the doctrine of the Trinity as the just mean between 
Jewish monotheism, or Monarchianism, and pagan polytheism. To 
the question, why three divine persons are not three Gods rather than 
one, he replies, that the word God (θεός) designates the divine essence, 
which is one, and not the person; his investigations, occasioned by 
this problem, concerning the relation of the divine essence to the 
individuals in the Godhead, are in a certain respect an anticipation 
of the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The origin of the human 
soul is simultaneous with that of the body; it is everywhere present 
in its body; it survives the body, and has, after the death of the 
latter, a spaceless existence; but it has the power to find again, from 
amidst the whole mass of existing matter, the particles which be- 
longed to its body, and to reappropriate them, so that at the resurrec- 
tion it will again clothe itself in its body. Gregory lays great weight 
on human freedom in the matter of appropriating the means of salva- 
tion; only on condition of this freedom, he argues, can we be con- 
vinced of God’s justice in the acceptance of some and the rejection 
of others; God foresaw how each man would decide, and determined 
his fate accordingly. Moral evil is the only real evil; it was neces- 
sary in view of human freedom, without which man would not be 
essentially superior to the animal. In view of this justification of 








GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 327 


the moral order of the world, Gregory repels the Manichzan dualism 
between a good and a bad principle. From God’s superabundant 
goodness and from the negative nature of evil follows the final salva- 
tion of all beings; punishment serves for purification; there will be 
no place left for evil, when the will of God is triumphant. 


The works of Gregory of Nyssa have been published in part by L. Sifanus (Basel, 1562 and 1571) and 
others; a completer edition, by Morellus (Paris, 1615), Single works of his have been edited by various 
men, notably. in recent times, the Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection, by Krabinger (Leipsic, 
1837); a selection of his most important writings, together with a German translation, has been published 
by Oehler (Bibliothek der Kirchenvdter, I. Theil: Gregor von Nyssa, Vols. L-1V., Leipsic, 1858-59); his 
dislogue on the soul and the resurrection, with German translation and critical notes, by Herm. Schmidt, 
was published at Halle in 1864. Concerning him treat Rupp (Gregors des Bischofs von Nyssa Leben und 
Meinungen, Leipsic, 1834), Heyns (Disp. de Greg. Nyss., Leyden, 1835), E. W. Miller (Gregoriit Nysseni 
doctrinam de hominis natura et illustravit et cum Origeniana comparavit, Halle, 1854) and Stigler (Die 
Psychologie des heiligen Gregorius von Nyssa, Regensburg, 1857). 


The most important scientific productions of the Greek Fathers issued from the School 
of Origen. From him his disciples inherited especially the love for Platonic studies, of 
which the result is manifest in the numerous imitations contained in their writings. That 
portion of the doctrine of Origen which disagreed with the then crystallizing doctrine of 
the Church, or whatever was heterodox in his teachings, they either openly opposed or 
tacitly removed. Methodius of Tyre (about 290—his extant writings have recently been 
published, together with copious demonstrations of the Platonic -correspondences in them, 
by Albert Jahn, Bern, 1865; in Migne’s Patrol. Cursus Compl., his works fill Vol. XVIII. 
of the Greek Fathers), although in other respects himself a Platonizer, argued against the 
doctrines of the pre-existence of the soul, its fall and descent into the body as into a prison, 
and the eternity of the divine creative work. He recommends an ascetic life. His exposi- 
tion is rich in fanciful analogies. In the later period of the existence of this school appear 
“the three lights of the Church of Cappadocia”: Basil the Great, of Ceesarea (cf. Alb. 
Jahn, Basilius Platonizans, Bern, 1838, and his Animadversiones, ibid., 1842; KE. Fialon’s 
Biographie de St. Basile, Paris, 1861), his friend, Gregory of Nazianzen, celebrated as a 
pulpit orator and theologian, and a pupil of Athanasius, and Basil’s brother Gregory, Bishop 
of Nyssa. These all held Origen in great reverence; Basil and Gregory of Nazianzen 
commenced preparing an anthology of his writings under the title φιλοκαλίας. In hie- 
rarchical talent Basil was the most distinguished of the three, while in the department of 
ecclesiastical theology and eloquence, Gregory of Nazianzen was most eminent; but in 
respect of the philosophical demonstration of Christian dogmas, Gregory of Nyssa did the 
most important service, for which reason to him alone a more detailed exposition must 
here be devoted. Hilarius of Poitiers (respecting whom a comprebensive monograph has 
recently been published by Reinkens, Breslau, 1865), the champion of Athanasianism in 
the West, about the middle of the fourth century, is also rather of significance for the 
history of the Church than for that of philosophy, and the same may be said of Julius 
Firmicus Maternus—who wrote, near the middle of the fourth century, De Errore Profa- 
narum Religionum (ed. Carl Halm, Vienna, 1865, see above, p. 263), in order to excite the 
secular authorities to an energetic persecution of the adherents of the ancient faith—as 
also of Cyprian, the predecessor by a century of the latter (lived 200-258), and many other 
Church teachers. 

At the period in the history of Christianity at which we have now arrived, the period 
when Christianity had attained to political supremacy and had become dogmatically fixed 


$28 GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 


by decrees of Councils, there appears, together with the greater orthodoxy of its doctrines 
in point of objective expression, a less degree of firmness or at least of directness in the 
convictions of its supporters with reference to these doctrines. This is characteristically 
illustrated in the language used by Gregory of Nyssa in his ‘“ Dialogue with his sister 
Macrina concerning the Resurrection ”—language which he indeed admits to be somewhat 
imprudent and bold, but which no one of the earlier Church Fathers could have em- 
ployed, namely: ‘The words of Scripture are like commandments, by which we are 
forcibly constrained to believe in the eternal duration of the soul; we have not been con- 
vinced of this doctrine by rational demonstration, but in this, as in other respects, our 
minds seem servilely to accept through fear what we are commanded to believe, and not 
spontaneously impelled to assent to it” (III. p. 183 ο, ed. Morell). Gregory, it is true, con- 
demns this language on his part; but in that which follows it we do not find that the 
mental attitude of Gregory is, for example, that of one who seeks merely to excite anew 
and to confirm a faith founded on the witness of the divine to the human spirit, a faith 
directly awakened by Scripture and preaching, and only diminished in energy; we find 
rather that the author proceeds to furnish the required rational proofs, and this, too, 
not with a view to raising to knowledge a faith already fixed and sure of itself, but in 
order to prop up the faith, which at least for a moment was wavering, and to restore the 
lacking conviction. The deductions of the writer are at times interrupted by an appeal to 
passages of Scripture (which, however, are allegorically interpreted, after the manner of 
the Alexandrians, with an arbitrariness limited only by the rule of faith and the dogmatic 
canon, notwithstanding the unconditional subjection which Gregory expressly professes to 
the authority of the Scriptures, see III. 20); but the complete unity of the theological and 
philosophical points of view disappears ; Gregory of Nyssa is the representative of the sepa- 
ration, beginning in his time, of these two intellectual forces, theology and philosophy, in the 
sense above indicated. Later authors (as Augustine, notably) returned indeed to the order 
proclaimed by Clement, and made their thinking dependent on their faith, yet not in the 
sense of a mere restoration of the earlier form of religious thought; from the time when a 
certain body of doctrine had been finally defined, the immediate unity of the processes of 
demonstration and definition ceased with reference to it, and remained confined to dogmas 
not yet defined, and then began the new direction of thought to the work of the rational 
justification of given dogmas. From this time on, (Christian) philosophy becomes, with 
reference to the fundamental dogmas, what it was in the Middle Ages with reference to all 
doctrines (with few exceptions), the hand-maid of (uot identical with) theology. Yet the 
boundary-line is by no means altogether distinct; in many respects the character of the 
earlier period is apparent in the following one, and vice versa. The contrast between them 
appears in the fullest degree when the two first Christian centuries, especially the Apos- 
tolic and Gnostic periods, are compared with that medizval period, when hierarchism and 
scholasticism reached their culminating point; in the intervening centuries the contrast is 
reduced to a relative difference of more or less. 

In his λόγος κατηχητικός Gregory of Nyssa develops the Christian doctrine in systematic 
connection. The belief in God he grounds on the art and wisdom displayed in the order of 
the world, and the belief in the unity of God, on the perfection which must belong to God in 
respect of power, goodness, wisdom, eternity, and all other attributes, but which could not 
exist if there were several Gods. Still, continues Gregory, the Christian who combats the 
error of polytheism has need to exercise great care, lest, in contending against the Hel- 
lenes, he may unwittingly fall back into Judaism; for the Christian doctrine itself admits a 
distinction of hypostases in the unity of the divine nature. God has a Logos, for he can- 
not be without reason. But this Logos aannot be merely an attribute of God, it must be 








he Sy τῶι δὰ ,ὁ.,(ὁὰ 


GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 329 


conceived as a second person. To this more exalted conception of the divine Logos we are 
led by the consideration, that in the measure in which God is greater than we, all his pre- 
dicates must also be higher than the homonymous ones which belong to us. Our Logos is 
a limited one; our discourse has only a transient existence. But the subsistence (ὑπόστασις) 
of the divine Logos must be indestructible and eternal, and hence necessarily living, since 
that which is rational cannot be conceived as lifeless and soulless, like a stone. Moreover, 
the life of the word of God must be an independent life (αὐτοζωή), and not a mere life by par- 
ticipation (ζωῆς μετουσία), since in the latter case it would lose its simplicity. But, further, 
there is nothing which has life and is deprived of will; therefore the divine Logos has also 
the faculty of will (προαιρετικὴν δύναμιν). Again, the will of the Logos must be equalled 
by his power, since a mixture of power with impotence would destroy his simplicity. His 
will, as being divine, must be also good and efficient ; but from the ability and will to work 
the good follows the realization of the latter, hence the bringing into existence of the wisely 
and artfully adjusted world. But since, still further, the logical conception of the Word is 
in a certain sense a relative one (πρός τι), the word being necessarily related in thought to 
him who speaks it, it follows that, together with the Word, the Father of the Word must 
be recognized as existing (ov yap ἄν εἴη λόγος͵ bn τινος ὧν λόγος). Thus the mystery of 
our faith avoids equally the absurdity (ἀτοπία) of Jewish monotheism, which denies to the 
Word life, activity, and creative power, and that of heathen polytheism, since we acknowl- 
edge the equality in nature of the Word and of the Father of the Word; for whoever affirms 
goodness or power or wisdom or eternity or freedom from evil, death and decay, or abso- 
lute perfection as a mark of the Father, will find the Logos, whose existence is derived from 
the Father, marked by the same attributes (Ady. katy. Prologue and chap. 1). In like 
manner Gregory seeks by the analogy of human breath—which indeed (he adds) is nothing 
but inhaled and exhaled fire, 7. e., an object foreign to us—to demonstrate the community 
of the divine Spirit with the essence of God and the independence of its existence (iid., 
chap. 2). In this doctrine he believes the proper mean between Judaism and Paganism to 
be found: from the Jewish doctrine the unity of the divine nature (ἡ τῆς φύσεως ἑνότης) 
has been retained, from Hellenism, the distinction into hypostases (ἡ κατὰ τὰς ὑποστάσεις 
διάκρισις, ibid., chap. 3). (That the same argumentation, which in the last analysis reposes 
only on the double sense of ὑπόστασις, viz.: a) real subsistence, Ὁ) individually independent, 
not attributive subsistence, could be used with reference to each of the divine attributes, 
and so, for the complete restoration of polytheism, Gregory leaves unnoticed.) A number 
of difficulties, arising from this view of the topics thus far treated, are discussed by Greg- 
ory in treatises ‘‘Concerning Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” ‘On the Holy Trinity,” “On 
Tritheism,” and “To the Hellenes, from the Stand-point of the Universal Dicta of Rea- 
son.” In the last-named work he says: If the name God signified the person of God, then, 
whenever we speak of the three persons we should necessarily speak of three Gods; but 
if the name God indicates the essence of God, then we affirm the existence of only one 
God, acknowledging, as we do, that the essence of the Holy Triad is only one. Now, in 
fact, the name God is the name only of the divine essence. If it were a personal name, 
only one of the three persons would be called God, just as only one is called Father. But 
if it should be said: we call Peter and Paul and Barnabas three men, and not one man, as 
we should be compelled to do if the word man signified the universal essence of humanity, 
and not rather individual human existence (τὴν μερικὴν, or what Gregory calls a more 
exact expression, ἰδικὴν οὐσίαν); and if it be said that, according to this analogy, the word 
God, like the word man, ought to be considered as denoting separate, individual personality, 
and that it must be confessed that there are three Gods in the Christian Trinity,—Gregory 
admits, in reply, the analogy, but interprets and applies it in a contrary sense, affirming 


330 GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 


that the word man, like all similar words, is applied to individuals only by an abuse of 
language, which arose from the accidental circumstance that it is not always possible ta 
perceive the same essence in individuals of the lower orders (evidently a doubtful way of 
meeting the difficulty, since the plural can express nothing but the plurality of individuals 
of the same essence or nature, similarity of essence and identity of concept not excluding 
the possibility of numerical difference; when Gregory says, p. 85, c,d: ἔστε δὲ Πέτρος καὶ 
Παῦλος καὶ Βαρνάβας κατὰ τὸ ἄνθρωπος εἷς ἄνθρωπος Kai κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο, κατὰ τὸ ἄνθρωπος, 
πολλοὶ οὐ δύναται εἶναι, λέγονται δὲ πολλοὶ ἄνθρωποι καταχρηστικῶς καὶ οὐ κυρίως, it is impos- 
sible not to perceive that he confounds the abstract conception, which indeed excludes the 
plural, with the concrete conception, which demands it; and so sometimes expressly em- 
ploys the abstract. for the concrete expression, as in Ὁ. 86a, where he says of Scripture: 
φυλάττουσα ταὐτότητα θεότητος ἐν ἰδιότητι ὑποστάσεων). It is doubtless not without a 
feeling of the deficiencies of his argumentation, that Gregory confesses that man can by 
severe study of the depths of the mystery win only a moderate knowledge of it, such is its 
unspeakable nature (κατὰ τὸ ἀπόῤῥητον μετρίαν τινὰ κατανόησιν---:λόγ. KaTny., cap. 3 init.). 
God created the world by his reason and wisdom, for he cannot have proceeded 
irrationally in that work; but his reason and wisdom are, as above shown, not to be 
conceived as a spoken word or as the mere possession of knowledge, but as a substantially- 
existent, personal and willing potency. If the entire world was created by this second 
divine hypostasis, then certainly was man also thus created, yet not in view of any neces- 
sity, but from superabounding love (ἀγάπης περιουσίᾳ), that there might exist a being, who 
should participate in the divine goods. If man was to be receptive of these goods, it was 
necessary that his nature should contain an element akin to God, and, in particular, that 
he should share in the eternity of the divine nature, ὦ e, be immortal. Thus, then, man 
was created in the image of God and in possession of all divine goods. He could not, 
therefore, be without the gifts of freedom, independence, and self-determination, and his 
participation in the divine goods was consequently made dependent on his virtue. In 
virtue of his freedom he could decide in favor of evil, which cannot have its origin in the 
divine will, since then it would not be subject to censure—but only in our inner selves, 
where it arises in the form of deviation from good, just as darkness is the privation 
(στέρησις) of light, or as blindness is the privation of the power of vision. The antithesis 
between virtue and vice is not to be so conceived, as if they were two independent exist- 
ences; but just as to being non-being is opposed, not as a second existence, but as non- 
existence set over-against existence, so vice is opposed to virtue, not as something existing 
in and for itself, but as absence of the better. Since now all that is created is subject to 
change, it was possible that first one of the created spirits, namely, he who was entrusted 
with the oversight of the earth, should turn his eye away from the good and become 
envious, and that from this envy should arise a leaning toward badness which should, in 
natural sequence, prepare the way for all other evil. He seduced the first men into the 
folly of turning away from goodness, by disturbing the divinely-ordered harmony between 
their sensuous and intellectual natures and guilefully tainting their wills with evil 
(Ady. κατ., chs. 5 and 6). God knew what would happen and hindered it not, that he 
might not destroy our freedom; he did not, on account of his foreknowledge of the evil 
which would result from man’s creation, leave man uncreated, for it was better to bring 
back sinners to original grace by the way of repentance and physical suffering than not to 
create man at all. The raising up of the fallen was a work befitting the giver of life, the 
God who is the wisdom and power of God, and for this purpose he became man (ibid., chs. 
1, 8; 14 seq.). The incarnation was not unworthy of him; for only evil brings disgrace 
(ch. 9). The objection, that the finite cannot contain the infinite, and that therefore the 








GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS, 331 


human nature could not receive into itself the divine, is founded on the false supposition 
that the incarnation of the Word means, that the infinity of God was contained in the 
limits of the flesh as in a vessel; on the contrary, the divine nature is to be conceived as 
having been so united with the human, as flame is with a combustible, which former ex- 
tends beyond the latter, as aiso our souls overstep the limits of our bodies and through 
the motions of thought extend themselves without hindrance through the whole creation 
(ch. 10). For the rest, the manner in which the divine nature was united to the human sur- 
passes our power of comprehension, although we are not permitted to doubt the fact of that 
union in Jesus, on account of the miracles which he wrought; the supernatural character of 
those miracles bears witness to their divine origin (ch. 11 seq.). After we had freely sold 
ourselves to evil, he, who of his goodness sought to restore us to liberty, could not for this 
end have recourse to measures of arbitrary violence, but must follow the way of justice, 
It was necessary, therefore, that a ransom should be paid, which should exceed in value 
that which was to be ransomed, and hence it was necessary that the Son of God should 
surrender himself to the power of death. His goodness moved him to save us and his 
justice impelled him to undertake the redemption by the way of exchange of those who 
were reduced to bondage. His power was more signally displayed by his incarnation than 
it would have been had he remained in his glory, and the act of incarnation was not in 
conflict with his wisdom, eternity, or omnipresence (ch. 22 seq.). By concealing the divine 
nature within the human, a certain deception was indeed practiced on the Evil One; but 
for the latter, as himself a deceiver, it was only a just recompense that he should be 
deceived himself; the great adversary must himself at last find that what has been done 
was just and salutary, when he also shall have been purified, and as a saved being shall 
experience the benefit of the incarnation (ch. 26). It was necessary that human degeneracy 
should have reached its lowest point before the work of salvation could enter in (ch. 29). 
That, however, grace through faith has not come to all men must not be laid to God’s 
account, who has sent forth his call to all men, but to the account of human freedom; 
if God were to break down our opposition by violent means, the virtue and praiseworthi- 
ness of human conduct would be destroyed in the destruction of human freedom, and man 
would be degraded to the level of the irrational brute (ch. 30 seq.). Gregory seeks farther 
to show how it was worthy of God that he should die on the cross (ch. 32). He then 
shows the saving nature of prayer and of the Christian sacraments (chs. 33-37). It is 
essential for regeneration to believe that the Son and the Spirit are not created spirits, but 
of like nature with God the Father; for he who would make his salvation dependent on 
anything created would trust to an imperfect nature and one itself needing a savior (ch. 38 
seq.; cf. the treatise on the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, p. 38, d: those who hold the Son 
to have been created must either worship a creature, which is idolatrous, or not worship 
him, which is unchristian and Jewish). He alone has truly become a child of God who 
gives evidence of his regeneration by voluntarily putting away from himself all vice 
(ch. 40). 

A series of antfropological speculations are contained in the work ‘‘On the Creation of 
Man.” Biblical propositions are combined with Aristotelian and Platonic ideas and with a 
teleological physiology. The possibility of the creation of matter by the divine spirit rests 
on the fact that matter is only the unity of qualities which in themselves are immaterial 
(ch. 23 seq.). Man is more noble than the rest of creation (ch. 3). His spirit pervades 
his whole body, and not merely a single part of it (ch. 12 seq.). It begins to exist at 
the same time with the body, neither before nor after (ch. 28). The soul will at a future 
time be reunited with its body, and, once purified by punishment, will return to the Good 
(ch. 21). The subject of eschatology is discussed by Gregory in the “Dialogue con- 


332 GREGORY OF NYSSA AND OTHER ORIGENISTS. 


cerning the Soul and the Resurrection.” Faith in the continued existence of the sout 
after death is declared to be necessary to virtue, since it is only on the condition of man’s 
future existence that virtue has any advantage over pleasure (p. 184, a). But Gregory 
does not (like Lactantius) proceed at once to construct on the basis of this necessity a 
‘“‘moral” argument for immortality, holding, rather, that the case is one that calls for 
speculative or scientific arguments. To the objection of those who assert that the nature 
of the soul, as of all real things, is material, he replies that the truth of this doctrine 
would involve the truth of Atheism, but that Atheism is refuted by the fact of the wise 
order which reigns in the world, and that the spiritual nature of God, which cannot be 
denied, proves the possibility of immaterial existence (p. 184, b seq.). We may with the 
same right conclude from the phenomena of the human Microcosm to the actual existence 
of an immaterial soul, as from the phenomena of the world as a whole to the reality of 
God’s existence (p. 188, b seq.). The soul is defined by Gregory as a created being, having 
life, the power of thought, and, so long as it is provided with the proper organs, the power 
of sensuous perception (p. 189, c). The power of thought is not an attribute of matter, 
since, were it otherwise, matter would show itself endowed with it, would, for example, 
combine its elements so as to form works of art (p. 192, b seq.). In its substantial exist- 
ence, as separable from matter, the soul is like God; but this likeness does not extend 
to the point of identity; the soul only resembles God, as a copy resembles its original 
(p. 196, a). As being “simple and uncompounded” (ἁπλῇ καὶ ἀσύνθετος φύσις) the soul 
survives the dissolution of the composite body (otyxpyza—p. 197, c), whose scattered 
elements it continues and will continue to accompany, as if watching over its property, 
until the resurrection, when it will clothe itself in them anew (p. 198, b seq.; ef. 213, a 
seq.). Anger and desire do not belong to the essence of the soul, but are only among its 
varying states (πάθη τῆς φύσεως καὶ οὐκ οὐσία); they are not originally a part of ourselves, 
and we can and must rid ourselves of them (p. 199, ¢ seq.), and bring them, so long as 
they continue to mark our community with the brute creation, into the service of good (p. 
204, ec seq.). Hades, which the soul enters after its separation from the world of sense, 
is not a particular place; it means the Invisible (τὸ ἀφανές te καὶ ἀειδές, p. 210, a; ef. 
Plat., Phaedo, p. 80,d); those passages in the Bible in which the regions under the earth 
are alluded to are explained by Gregory as not literal or descriptive of real localities, but 
allegorical—although in this point Gregory would not strenuously resist the partisans of 
the opposite interpretation, since in the principal point, the recognition of the soul’s future 
existence, he and they agree (p. 211, a seq.). God decrees to sinners severe and long-con- 
tinued pains in eternity, not because he hates them, nor for the sake alone of punishing 
them, but for their improvement, which latter cannot take place until the soul has under- 
gone a painful purging from all its impurities (p. 226, b seq.). The degree of pain which 
must thus be endured by each one is necessarily proportioned to the measure of his 
wickedness (227, Ὁ). When the process of purification has been completed, the better 
attributes of the soul appear, imperishability, life, honor, grace, glory, power, and, in short, 
all that belongs to human nature as the image of divinity (p. 260, b). In this sense the 
resurrection is the restoration of man to his original state—as Gregory often defines it 
(ἀνάστασίς ἐστιν ἡ εἰς TO ἀρχαῖον THE φύσεως ἡμῶν ἀποκατάστασις, p. 252, Ὁ et al.). 

The doctrine of the final reunion of all things with God is too firmly rooted in Gregory’s 
conception of the negative nature and limited power of evil, and of the supreme goodness 
of the God whose punishments aim only at the improvement of the sinner, to admit of the 
passages in his writings, which contain this doctrine, being regarded as interpolations. 
Such, according to the report of Photius (Bibl. Cod., 233), the Patriarch Germanus of Con- 
stantinople (about 700) pretended that they were; the Patriarch was evidently moved 








SAINT AUGUSTINE. 333 


by the apologetic desire to save Gregory’s orthodoxy. Yet it cannot be denied that 
Gregory’s doctrine of freedom, as excluding all compulsion of the will in the direction of 
goodness, does not accord well with the theory of the necessary return of every soul to 
goodness; one can but regret the absence of any attempt to remove this at least seeming 
contradiction. 

Without doubt Augustine was a more highly gifted man than Gregory; yet the Ori- 
genistic and Gregorian form of teaching, as compared with the Augustinian, possesses never- 
theless, in point of logic and moral spirit, advantages peculiar to itself which were never 
reached by the Latin Church Father. 


§ 86. In Augustine the development of ecclesiastical doctrine in 
the Patristic Period reaches its culminating point. Aurelius Augus- 
tinus was born on the 13th of November, in the year 354, and died 
August 28, 430, while Bishop of Hippo Regius. His father was a 
heathen, but his mother was a Christian, who brought up her son 
in the Christian faith. He subsequently espoused the belief of the 
Manicheans and prepared himself by classical studies for the office of 
a teacher of rhetoric. After a skeptical transition-period, when also 
Platonic and Neo-Platonic speculations had prepared him for the 
change, he was won over by Ambrosius to Catholic Christianity, in the 
service of which he thenceforth labored as a defender and constructor 
of doctrines, and also practically as a priest and bishop. Against the 
Skepticism of the Academics Augustine urges that man needs the 
knowledge of truth for his happiness, that it is not enough merely to 
inquire and to doubt, and he finds a foundation for all our knowledge, 
a foundation invulnerable against every doubt, in the consciousness we 
have of our sensations, feelings, our willing, and thinking, in short, of 
all our psychical processes. From the undeniable existence and pos- 
session by man of some truth, he concludes to the existence of God as 
the truth per se; but our conviction of the existence of the material 
world he regards as only an irresistible belief. Combating heathen 
religion and philosophy, Augustine defends the doctrines and institu- 
tions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against 
the Neo-Platonists, whom he rates most highly among all the ancient 
philosophers, the Christian theses that salvation is to be found in 
Christ alone, that divine worship is due to no other being beside the 
triune God, since he created all things himself, and did not commission 
inferior beings, gods, demons, or angels to create the material world; 
that the soul with its body will rise again to eternal salvation or 
damnation, but will not return periodically to renewed life upon the 
earth ; that the soul does not exist before the body, and that the latter 


334 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 


is not the prison of the former, but that the soul begins to exist at the 
same time with the body; that the world both had a beginning and 
is perishable, and that only God and the souls of angels and men are 
eternal.—Against the dualism of the Manicheans, who regarded good 
and evil as equally primitive, and represented a portion of the divine 
substance as having entered into the region of evil, in order to war 
against and conquer it, Augustine defends the monism of the good 
principle, or of the purely spiritual God, explaining evil as a mere 
negation or privation, and seeking to show from the finiteness of the 
things in the world, and from their differing degrees of perfection, 
that the evils in the world are necessary, and not in contradiction 
with the idea of creation; he also defends, in opposition to Mani- 
cheism (and Gnosticism in general), the Catholic doctrine of the 
essential harmony between the Old and New Testaments. Against 
the Donatists, Augustine maintains the unity of the Church. In 
opposition to Pelagius and the Pelagians, he asserts that divine grace 
is not conditioned on human worthiness, and maintains the doctrine 
of absolute predestination, or, that from the mass of men who, through 
the disobedience of Adam (in whom all mankind were present poten- 
tially), have sunk into corruption and sin, some are chosen by the free 
election of God to be monuments of his grace, and are brought to 
believe and be saved, while the greater number, as monuments of his 
justice, are left to eternal damnation. 


The works of St. Angustine were published at Basel in 1506, and subsequently—edited by Erasmus—in 
1528-29 and 1569. An edition by the Lovanienses theologi appeared at Antwerp in 1577, another, by the 
Benedictines of the Maurine Congregation, at Paris, 1689-1700(Hd. Nov., Antwerp, 1700-1703), and still 
another, in more recent times, at Paris, 1835-40. Of the numerous writings of Augustine the Confessiones 
(ed. stereotyp., Leipsic, 1807) and De Civitate Dei (Leipsic, 1825, Cologne, 1850, Leipsic, 1863), have very 
frequently been edited separately; Krabinger’s edition of the Enchiridion ad Lawrentiwm de Fide, Spe 
et Caritate (Tiibingen, 1861) is distinguished by its critical exactness. Cf. Busch, Librorwm Augustint 
Recensus, Dorpat, 1826. In Migne’s Patr., the works of Augustine form Vois. XXXII.-XLVII. of the 
Latin Fathers. The fourth volume of a French translation, made under the direction of Ponjoulat and 
Raulx, and to be completed in fifteen volumes, appeared at Montauban, in 1866. 

The Biography of Augustine, by his younger friend Possidius, is to be found in most of the editions 
of Augustine’s works (especially in Vol. X. of the Maurine edition); it serves as ἃ complement to Augus- 
tine’s own Confessions. Of the numerous modern works on Augustine, the most comprehensive are those 
of G. F. Wiggers ( Versuch einer pragmat. Darstellung des Augustinismus u. Pelagianismus, Hamburg, 
1821-83), Kloth (Der heilige Kirchenlehrer Auqustinus, Aix-la-Chapelle, 1840); C. Bindemann (Der hetlige 
Aug., Vol. I., Berlin, 1844; Vol. II., Leipsic, 1856: Vol. III., Greifswald, 1869). Friedrich Bohringer, in his 
Geach. ἃ. Kirche Chr. (I. 8, Zurich, 1845, pp. 99-774), Neander (Ch. Hist.) and Schaff (Ch. Hist.), treat 
with great fullness of Augustine. On Augustine’s doctrine of time, cf. Fortlage (Heidelberg, 1836); on his 
psychology : Gangauf (Augsburg, 1852) and Ferraz (Paris, 1863, 2d edition, 1869); on his logic: Prantl (Gesch. 
der Logik im Abendlande, I., Leipsic, 1855, pp. 665-672); on his doctrine of cognition: Jac. Merten ( Veber 
die Bedeutung der Erkenntnisslehre des heiligen Augustinus und des heiligen Thomas won Aquino fir 
den gesch. Entwicklungsgang der Philosophie als reiner Vernunftwissenschaft, Treves, 1865), and Nic. Jos. 
Ludw. Schiitz (Divi Augustini de origine et via cognitionis intellectualis doctrina ab ontologismi nota 
vindicata, comm. philos., Minster, 1867); on his doctrine of self-knowledge: E. Melzer (Aug. atque 








LS 
“ὦ 


SAINT AUGUSTINE. 335 


Cartesti placita de mentis humanae sui cognitione quomodo inter se congruant a seseque differant, diss. 
énaug., Bonn, 1860): on his doctrine of sin and grace in relation to the doctrines of Paul and the Reformers: 
Zeller (in the Theol. Jahrb., Tibingen, 1854. pp. 295 seq.); on his doctrine of miracles: Friedr. Nitzsch 
(Berlin, 1865); on his doctrine of God as triune: Theodor Gangauf (Augsburg, 1866); on his philosophy of 
history: Jos. Reinkens (Schaffhausen, 1866). Of the more recent French works on Augustine the most 
comprehensive is F. Nourrisson’s La Philosophie de St. Augustin, Paris, 1865, 2d ed., 1866. Cf. also A. F, 
Hewitt, The Problems of the Age, with Studies in St. Augustine, New York, 1863. 


Augustine’s father, Patricius, remained a heathen until shortly before his death; his 
mother, Monica, was a Christian, and exerted a profound influence over her son. Educated 
at Thagaste, Madaura, and Carthage, Augustine followed first in his native city, then at 
Carthage and Rome, and from 384—386 in Milan, the vocation of a teacher of eloquence; 
yet his interest always centered chiefly in theological problems. The Hortensius of Cicero 
awakened in the young man, who had been addicted to sensuous pleasures, the love of 
philosophical inquiry. The biblical Scriptures failed at that time, in respect of form and 
content, to satisfy him. To the question of the origin of evil, the Manichzan dualism 
seemed to him to furnish the most satisfactory answer; the supporters of this doctrine 
seemed to him, also, to judge more correctly, when they rejected the Old Testament as 
contradicting the New, than did the Catholic Church, which presupposed the entire har- 
mony of all biblical writings. But the contradictions of the Manichzean doctrine in itself 
and with astronomical facts gradually destroyed his faith in it, and he approached more 
and more toward the skepticism of the New Academy, till finally (in the year 386) the 
reading of certain writings of (Plato and) Neo-Platonists (in the translation of Victorinus) 
turned him in the direction of a positive faith, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrosius at 
Milan—which he had attended originally only on account of the rhetorical excellence of 
the style of that orator—led him back to the Church. The allegorical interpretation of the 
Old Testament removed its apparent contradictions with the New, and removed from the 
notion of God that anthropomorphism which had given offense to Augustine; and the 
thought of the harmony of the divinely-created universe in all its parts converted him 
from dualism. Augustine was baptized by Ambrosius at Easter in 387. Soon afterward 
he returned to Africa, became in 391 priest at Hippo Regius and in 395 was raised to 
the dignity of a bishop at the same place (first as assistant bishop of Valerius, who soon 
afterward died). He waged an untiring combat against the Manichzans, Donatists, and 
Pelagians, and labored for the confirmatiom and extension of the Catholic faith, advancing 
constantly more and more from religious philosophy to positive dogmatics. He died on 
the 28th of August, in the year 430. 

The earliest of Augustine’s works, written in his Manichzan period, while he was a 
professional rhetorician, and entitled De Pulchro et Apto, is lost. Of his extant works, the 
earliest is that directed against the skepticism of the Academics (Contra Academicos), which 
he composed before his baptism, while residing at Cassiciacum, near Milan, in the autumn 
of 386; at the same place he wrote the treatises De Beata Vila and De Ordine and the 
Soliloguia, and after his return to Milan, but also before his baptism, the De Jmmortalitate 
Animae, which is the sketch of a continuation of the Soliloquies, and a book on Grammar. 
Here also he began to write works on Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Music, and 
Philosophy (August., Retract., 1.6). Still, the genuineness of the works on grammar and on 
the principles of dialectic and rhetoric, published among his writings, has been questioned ; 
according to Prantl’s showing, the Principia Dialectices may perhaps be considered as 
genuine, while the supplementary treatise on the ten categories is spurious; the latter is 
perhaps (as Prantl conjectures) a modification of Themistius’ paraphrase of the Categories 
of Aristotle (cf. W. Crecelius, S. Aurelit Augustini de Dialectica Liber, G.-Pr., Elberfeld, 


890 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 


1857, for the arguments in favor of the genuineness of the Dialectic and Rhetoric at- 
tributed to Augustine, and for the spuriousness of the Grammar, together with emenda- 
tions of the text of the Dialectic). The work on immortality was followed by another on 
the Greatness of the Soul, composed while Augustine was stopping at Rome, on his return 
from Milan to Africa; this was succeeded by the three books on the Freedom of the Wiil, 
directed against the Manichzean solution of the question of the origin of evil—of which 
books he wrote the two last in Africa—and by the works on the Morals of the Catholic 
Church and on the Morals of the Manichwans, which were likewise begun at Rome; at 
Thagaste, whither he returned in 388, he composed, among other works, the books on Music, 
the work De Genest contra Manicheos—an allegorical interpretation of the biblical history 
of creation—and the book De Vera FReligione, which he had already projected while at 
Cassiciacum ; this latter work was an attempt to-develop faith into knowledge. His works 
against Manichzeism are the De Utilitate Credendé, which was written while Augustine was 
presbyter at Hippo, the De duabus Animabus, in which he combats the doctrine of the 
union of a good and a bad soul in man, the work against Adimantus, the disciple of Mani, 
which discusses the relation of the Old Testament to the New, and the Disputation with 
Fortunatus; in the period of Augustine’s presbyterial functions, fall also—besides numer- 
ous expositions of the books of Scripture, including a literal interpretation of the first 
part of Genesis—a discourse concerning fuith and the symbol or confession of faith, and 
his casuistical work on lying. Of the works subsequently composed by Augustine, after 
he was made a bishop, the greater number were polemical writings aimed against the 
Donatists and the Pelagians, being written in the former case in defense of the unity of 
the Church, and in the latter in defense of the dogma of original sin and of the predestina- 
tion of man by the free grace of God; of especial importance are the works on the Trinity 
(400-410) and on the City of God (De Civitate Dei), the latter Augustine’s principal work, 
begun in 413, completed in 426. The Confessiones were written about 400. The Retrac- 
tationes were written by Augustine a few years before his death, and are a review of his 
own works, together with corrective remarks, which, for the most part, were intended to 
restrict those of his earlier opinions which were deemed too favorable to the sciences and 
to human freedom, so as to make them strictly accordant with the teaching of the Church. 

The knowledge which Augustine seeks is the knowledge of God and of himself (So- 
liloqu., I. 7: Dewm et animam sctre cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino. Ib., 11. 4: Deus 
semper idem, noverim me, noverim te!) Of the principal branches of philosophy, ethics or 
the doctrine of the highest good rightly fulfills its task only when it finds this good in the 
enjoyment of God; dialectic is valuable as an instrumental science, as the doctrine of cog- 
nition, teaching how to teach and how to learn (De Ord., II., 38; ef. De Civ. Dei, VIII. 10: 
rationalem partem sive logicam, in qua quaerttur, quonam modo veritas percipi possit); physics 
is of value only in so far as it teaches of God, the supreme cause; otherwise it is super- 
fluous, or so far as it contributes nothing to our salvation (Confess., V. 7: beatus autem qui te 
scit etiamst iila nesciat; qui vero et te et illa novit, non propter illa beatior, sed propter te solwis 
beatus est; ib., X. 55: hine ad perscrutanda naturae, quae praeter nos est, operta proceditur, 
quae scire nihil prodest). In opposition to the thought expressed in his early work, De 
Ordine (II. 14, 15), that the sciences constitute the way which leads us to the knowledge 
of the order which reigns in all things, and consequently to the knowledge of the divine 
wisdom, Augustine observes in the Retractationes (I. 3. 2), that there are many holy men 
who are not acquainted with the liberal sciences, and that many who are acquainted with 
them are without holiness. Science profits only where love is, otherwise she puffs up. 
Humility must cure us of the impulse to seek for unprofitable knowledge. To the good 
angels the knowledge of material things, with which demons are puffed up, appears mean 








SAINT AUGUSTINE. 337 


in comparison with the sanctifying love of the immaterial and immutable God; they have a 
more certain knowledge of things temporal and changeable, for the very reason that they 
behold the first causes of those things in the Word of God, by whom the world was made 
(De Civ. Dei, IX. 22). This view of Augustine respecting the relative value or worthless- 
ness of the various sciences exercised a decisive influence on the entire intellectual charac- 
ter of the Christian world of the Middle Ages. 

With his opinion of philosophy corresponds Augustine’s judgment respecting the phi- 
losophers before Christ (which it is worth while to reproduce here, more particularly on 
account of its influence in subsequent times). In the eighth book of the Civitas Dei (ch. 
2) he gives a sketch of the “Italic” and ‘‘Ionic” philosophy before Socrates; by the 
former he understands the Pythagorean philosophy, in the latter he includes the doctrine 
of Thales, Anaximarder, Anaximenes, and his two pupils Anaxagoras and Diogenes, of 
whom, he says, the former conceived God as the fashioner of matter, while the latter 
regarded air as the substance in which the divine reason inhered. One of Anaxagoras’ 
disciples, says Augustine, was Archelaus, and he is said to have had for a disciple Soc- 
rates, who (ch. 3) first limited all philosophy to ethics, either on account of the obscurity 
of physics, or, as some, who were more disposed to favor Socrates, have judged, because 
none but a mind ethically purified should venture on the investigation of the eternal light, 
in which the causes of all created beings live unchangeable. Of the disciples of Socrates, 
Augustine only mentions briefly Aristippus and Antisthenes, and then discourses more fully 
(ch. 4 seq.) of Plato and the Neo-Platonists as the most eminent of all ancient thinkers. 
After the death of Socrates, Plato familiarized himself with the wisdom of the Egyptians 
and the Pythagoreans. He divided philosophy into moralis, naturalis, and rationalis philo- 
sophia; the latter belongs principally (together with natural philosophy) to theoretical 
(contemplativa) philosophy, while moral philosophy is equivalent to practical (activa) phi- 
losophy. Plato, continues Augustine, retained in his writings the Socratic method of con- 
cealing his own opinions to that extent, that it is difficult to know what was his real belief 
respecting the most important subjects. Augustine prefers, therefore, to confine himself to 
the later Platonists, ‘qui Platonem ceteris philosophis gentium longe recteque praelatum acutius 
atque veracius intellexisse atque secuti esse fama celebriore laudantur.” Augustine numbers 
Aristotle among the Old Platonists, but adds that he founded a “‘secta” or ‘“‘haerests”’ of his 
own, distinct from the Academics; he was a “vir excellentis ingenii et eloquio Platoni quidem 
impar, sed multos facile superans” (De Civ. Dei, VIII. 12). The later followers of Plato desired 
to be called, not academics nor Peripatetics, but Platonists, pre-eminent among whom were 
Plotinus, Porphyry, and Jamblichus. For them God is the causa subsistendi, the ratio intelli. 
gendi, and the ordo vivendi (ch. 4). ‘‘ No philosophers have approached nearer to us than did 
they” (ch. 5). Their doctrine is superior to the “fabulous religion ” of the poets, the “civil 
religion” of the pagan state, and the “natural religion” of all other ancient philosophers, 
including that of the Stoics, who thought to find the first cause of all things in fire, and that 
of the Epicureans, who found the same in the atoms, and both of which philosophical sects 
were too sensualistic in their theories of knowledge and too little theological in their ethics. 
In searching for the eternal and immutable God, the Platonists, with reason, went beyond 
the material world and the soul and the realm of mutable spirits (De Civ. Dei, VIII. 6: 
cuncta corpora transscenderunt quaerentes Deum; omnem animam mutabilesque omnes spiritus 
transscenderunt quaerentes summum Deum). But they separated themselves from the truth 
as held by Christians, in paying religious veneration, not only to this supreme God, 
but also to inferior deities and demons, who are not creators (De Civ. Dei, XII. 24). The 
Christian, even without the aid of philosophy, knows from the Holy Scriptures, that God 
is eur Creator, our teacher, and the giver of grace (De Civ. Dei, VIII. 10). Some Chris- 

22 


338 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 


tians have been led, in their astonishment at the agreement of Plato's theology with 
that of the Scriptures, to the belief that, while he was in Egypt, he heard the prophet Jere- 
miah, or even read the prophetic Scriptures; Augustine confesses that for a time he him- 
self entertained that opinion (expressed by him, De Doctr. Christ., II. ch. 29); but he finds 
(De Civ. Dei, VIII. 11), that Plato lived considerably later than Jeremiah; he holds it not 
impossible that Plato made himself acquainted with the contents of the biblical writings 
by means of an interpreter, and thinks that he may have drawn his doctrine of the immu- 
tability of God from the biblical expressions: Ego sum qui sum, and qui est, misit me ad vos 
(Exod. iii. 14); yet he (ch. 12) holds it quite as possible that Plato inferred the eternal 
being of God from the contemplation of the world, according to the words of the Apostle 
(Rom. i. 19 seq.). The Platonists were not altogether without a knowledge even of the 
Trinity, although they speak of three Gods with undisciplined words (De Civ. Dei, X. 29). 
But they reject the doctrine of the incarnation of the immutable Son of God, and do not 
believe that the divine reason, which they call πατρικὸς νοῦς, took on itself a human 
body and suffered the death of the cross; for they do not truly and loyally love wisdom 
and virtue, they despise humility, and illustrate in themselves the words of the prophet 
(Isaiah xxix. 14): perdam sapientiam sapientium et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo (De 
Civ. Dei, X. 29). These philosophers saw, though obscurely, the goal, the eternal father- 
land; but they missed their way, and their disciples are now ashamed to leave the school 
of Plato for the school of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost gave to the fisherman, John, the 
knowledge of the Incarnate Word (ib., ch. 29). Not he who, following reason, lives 
according to human customs, but only he who subjects his spirit to the will of God and 
follows God’s commands, can be saved (Retract., I. 1. 2). 

In the earliest of his extant works Augustine seeks to demonstrate, in opposition to the 
Academics, the existence of a necessary element in knowledge. It is a characteristic 
feature of his discussion of this subject that he does not begin with the question of the 
origin of knowledge, but with the question, whether the possession of truth is one of our 
wants, or whether, without it, happiness is possible; or, in other words, that he proceeds, 
in the first instance, not genetically, but teleologically. One of the interlocutors, the 
youthful Licentius, defends the proposition, that the mere searching for truth makes us 
happy, since wisdom or the life according to reason, and the intellectual perfection of man, 
on which his happiness depends, consist, at least during his earthly life, not in the posses- 
sion, but in the loyal and unceasing pursuit, of truth. Trygetius, a young man of the 
same age with Licentius, affirms, on the contrary, that it is necessary to possess the truth, 
since constant searching without finding is synonymous with erring. Licentius replies, 
that error consists rather in assenting to the false instead of the true; that seeking is not 
error, but rather wisdom, and is, as it were, the straight way of life, by following which 
man frees his spirit from the entanglements of the body, so far as this is possible, unites 
all its powers within itself, and becomes at the end of his life worthy to attain his true 
end, the enjoyment of divine, as now he enjoys human, happiness. But Augustine himself 

) does not at all approve the doctrine of Licentius. He affirms, first, that without the true 
the probable is unattainable, which yet the Academics held to be attainable, and then, that 
the true, to which the probable is similar—this similarity constituting the essence of the 
'probable—is the standard by which the probable is known. He then remarks that no one, 
certainly, can be wise without wisdom; and that every definition of wisdom, which ex- 
cludes knowledge from the idea of wisdom and makes the latter equivalent to the mere 
confession of ignorance, and to abstinence from all assent, identifies wisdom with nullity or 
with the false, and is therefore untenable. (It is obvious that Augustine here leaves 
wisdom in the sense of a ‘way of living,” out of consideration.) But if knowledge 











SAINT AUGUSTINE. 339 


belongs to wisdom, then it belongs also to happiness, for only the wise man is happy. He 
who lightly pretends to the name of the wise man without possessing the knowledge of 
truth, draws around himself only pitiable, deceived followers, who, always seeking, but 
never finding, with mind desolate and inspired by no living breath of truth, must end by 
cursing their misleading guides. Besides, the pretended inability of man to attain to 
knowledge does not exist, on which the Academics found their demand that men should 
always withhold their assent. It is neither true that the impressions of the senses are 
altogether deceptive, nor that thought is fully dependent on them; a certain kind of 
knowledge is arrived at even in physics and ethics through our dialectical knowledge of 
the necessity, that of the two alternatives of a contradictory disjunction, the one must be 
true (certum enim habeo, aut unum esse mundum aut non unum, et δὲ non unum, aut finiti 
numert aut infiniti, etc.). In the work De Beata Vita, Augustine adds the argument, that 
no one can be happy who is not in possession of that which he wishes to possess; but no 
one seeks who does not wish to find; he, therefore, who seeks the truth, without finding 
it, has not that which he wishes to find, and is not happy. Nor is he wise, for the wise 
man, as such, must be happy. So, too, he who seeks after God, has indeed already God’s 
grace, which leads him, but has not yet come to complete wisdom and happiness. In the 
Retractationes, however, Augustine emphasizes rather the thought, that perfect blessedness 
is not to be expected till the future life. 

Seeking, in opposition to Skepticism, an indubitable certitude as a point of departure 
for all philosophical investigation, Augustine finds it, in his work Contra Academicos, in all 
disjunctive propositions, on the one hand, and remarks, on the other, that our sensible 
perceptions are at least subjectively true: noli plus assentirt quam ut tta tibt apparere per- 
suadeas, et nulla deceptio est (Contra Acad., III. 26), and in the nearly synchronous work De 
Beata Vita (ch. 7), he lays down the principle, which has been so fruitful in philosophy, 
that it is impossible to doubt one’s own living existence—a principle, which, in the Solilo- 
quia, written immediately afterward, is expressed in this form: thought, and therefore the 
existence of the thinker, are the most certain of all things (Sol., I]. 1: Yu, qui vis te nosse, 
scis esse te? Scio. Unde scis? Nescio. Simplicem te sentis an multiplicem? Nescto. Moveri 
te scis? Nescio. Cogitare te scis? Scio). In like manner, Augustine concludes (in De Lid. 
Arbitr., 11. 1) from the possibility of our being deceived (υἱέ posse) to the fact of our 
existence, and makes being, life, and thought co-ordinate. (Cf. De Vera feligione, 72: 
noli foras tre, in te redt, in intertore homine habitat veritas, et si animam mutabilem in- 
veneris, transscende te ipsum. Ibid. 73: omnis, qui se dubitantem intelligit, verum intelligit, 
et de hac re, quam inteliigit, certus est. Omnis igitur qui utrum sit veritas dubitat, in se tpso 
habet verum unde non dubitet, nec ullum verum nisi verttate verum est. Non tlaque oportet eum 
de veritate dubitare, qui potutt undecunque dubitare. De Trinitate, X.14: utrum aéris sit vis 
vivendi—an ignis—dubitaverunt homines ; vivere se tamen et memintsse et intelligere et velie et 
cogitare et sctre et judicare quis dubitet? quandoquidem etiam si dubitat, vivit, st dubitat, unde 
dubitet meminit, si dubttat, dubitare se intelligit, si dubttat, certus esse vult, st dubitat, cogitat, 
si dubitat, scit se nescire, si dubitat, judicat non se temere consentire oportere. Ibid. XIV. 7: 
nihil enim tam novit mens, quam id, quod sibi praesto est, nec menti magis quidquam praesto 
est, quam ipsa sibi.) In De Civ. Det, XI. 26, Augustine finds an image of the divine 
Trinity in the triad of our being, our knowledge of our being and our self-love, in 
regard to which error is impossible (nam et swmus et nos esse novimus et id esse ac nosse 
diligimus ; in his autem tribus quae dixi, nulla nos falsitas verisimilis turbat; non enim ea, 
sicut tila quae forts sunt, ullo sensu corporis tangimus, . . . quorum sensibilium etiam imagines 
vis simillimas nec jam corporeas cogitatione versamus, memoria tenemus et per ipsas in 
éstorum desideria concitamur, sed sine ulla phantasiarum vel phantasmatum imaginatione 


340 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 


ludificatoria mihi esse me itdque nosse et amare certissimum est). That material bodies 
exist, we can indeed only believe; but this belief is necessary in practice (Confess., VI. 
7), and because not to believe thus would lead to worse errors (De Civ. Dei., XIX. 
18). Faith is also necessary to the knowledge of the wills of other men (De Fide 


_ Rerum, quae non Vid., 2). Faith, in the most general sense, is assenting to an idea (cum 


assensione cogitare, De Praedest. Sanct. 5). That which we know, we also believe; but 


| not all, that we believe, are we able immediately to know; faith is the way to knowl- 
edge (De Div., qu 83, qu. 48 and 68; De Trin. XV. 2; Epist., 120). When we reflect 


upon ourselves, we find in ourselves not only sensations, but also an internal sense which 
makes of the former its objects (for we have knowledge of our sensations, but the 
external senses are unable to perceive their own sensations), and, finally, reason, which 
knows both the internal sense and itself (De Lib. Arb., 11. 3 seq.). That which judges is 
always superior to that which is judged; but that, according to which judgment is ren- 
dered, is also superior to that which judges. The human reason perceives that there is 
something higher than itself; for it is changeable, now knowing, now not knowing, now 
seeking after knowledge, now not, now correctly, now incorrectly judging; but truth itself, 
which is the norm according to which it judges, must be unchangeable (De Lib. Arb., 
Il. 6; De Vera fel., 54, 57; De Civ. Dei, VIII. 6). If thou findest thy nature to be 
changeable, rise above thyself to the eternal source of the light of reason. Even if thou 
only knowest that thou doubtest, thou knowest what is true; but nothing is true unless 


truth exists. Hence it is impossible to doubt the existence of the truth itself (De Vera Rel, 


72 seq.). Now the unchangeable truth is God. Nothing higher than it can be con- 
ceived, for it includes all true being (De Vera Rel., 57; De Trin., VIII. 3). It is identical 


/with the highest good, in virtue of which all inferior goods are good (De Trin., VIII. 4; 


quid plura et plura? bonum hoc et bonum illud? tolle hoc et illud et vide ipsum bonum, st 


- potes, ita Deum videbis non alio bono bonum, sed bonum omnis boni). All ideas are in God. 


He is the eternal ground of all form, who imparted to created objects their temporal 
forms (De Div., qu. 46; De Ideis, 2: Sunt namque ideae principales formae quaedam vel 
rationes rerum stabiles et incommutabiles, quae ipsae formatae non sunt atque per hoc aeternae 
ac semper eodem modo se habentes, quae in divina intelligentia continentur, et quum tpsae neque 
oriantur neque intereant, secundwm eas tamen formari dicitur omne, quod interire potest et 


Lomne, quod oritur et interit); he is the absolute unity to which all that is finite aspires, 


without ever fully reaching it, the highest beauty, which is superior to and the condition 
of all other beauty (‘omnis pulchritudinis forma unitas est’); he is absolute wisdom, 
blessedness, justice, the moral law, etc. (De Vera Rel., 21 et al.; De Lib. Arb., 11. 9 seq.; 
De Trin., XIV. 21). The mutability of created things is to us a reminder of the immuta- 
bility of the truth (Conf, XI. 10). Plato did not err in positing the existence of an intelli- 
gible world; this was the name which he applied to the eternal and unchangeable reason, 
by which God made the world; he who refuses to accept this doctrine must say that God 
proceeded irrationally in the creation of the world (Retract., I. 3. 2). In the One divine 
wisdom are contained immeasurable and infinite treasures of intelligible things, in which 
are included all the invisible and immutable rational grounds of things (rationes rerum), not 
excepting the visible and mutable things, which were created by the divine wisdom (De Civ. 
Dei, XI. 10. 3; cf. De Div., quaest. 83, qu. 26.2: singula igitur proprits sunt creata rationibus). 
In the case of bodies, substance and attribute are different; even the soul, if it shall ever 
become wise, will become such only by participation in the unchangeable wisdom itself, 
with which it is not identical. But in beings whose nature is simple, and which are ulti- 
mate and original and truly divine, the quality does not differ from the substance, since 
such beings are divine, wise, and happy in themselves, and not by participation in something 











ὌΞΟΣ 


SAINT AUGUSTINE. 341 


foreign to them (De Civ. Dei, XI. 10.3). In the same manner it is true of God himself that 
the distinction of quality and substance, and, in short, of all the (Aristotelian) categories, is 
inapplicable to him. God falls under no one of the categories (De Trin., V. 2: ut sic intelli- 
gamus Deum, si possumus, quantum possumus, sine qualitate bonum, sine quantitate magnum, 
sine tndigentia creatorem, sine situ praesidentem, sine habitu omnia continentem, sine loco 
ubique totum, sine tempore sempiternum, sine ulla sui mutatione mutabilia facientem nthilque 
patientem). Even the category of substance is not properly applicable to God, although he 
in the highest sense is or has reality (De Trin., VI. 10: res ergo mutabiles neque simplices 
proprie dicuntur substantiae: Deus autem si subsistit ut substantia proprie dict possit, inest in €0 
aliquid tamquam in subjecto et non est simplex,—unde manifestum est Dewm abusive substan- 


tiam vocari, ut nomine usitatiore intelligatur essentia quod vere ac proprie dicitur), Yet' 


Augustine prefers to follow the terminology of the Church (¢., II. 35), all the more 
because an adequate knowledge of God and the power adequately to name him are unat- 
tainable by man in this earthly life (De Trin., VII. 7: verius enim cogitatur Deus, quam 
dicitur, et verius est, quam cogitatur). It may be questioned whether any positive affirma- 
tion respecting him is literally true (De Trin., V. 11; ef. Conf., XI. 26); we know with 
certainty only what he is not (De Ord., II. 44, 47); yet it is no inconsiderable advan- 
tage to be able to deny of God what does not belong to him (De Trin., VIII. 3). If 
we had no knowledge whatever of God we could not invoke and love him (De Trin., 
VIII. 12; Conjess., 1.1, VII. 16). God is, as was rightly perceived and acknowledged by the 
Platonists, the principle of being and knowledge, and the guiding-star of life (Conjess., 
VII. 16; De Civ. Dei, VIII. 4). He is the light in which we see the intelligible, the 
light of eternal reason; what we know, we know only in him (Conf., X. 65; XII. 35; De 
Trin., XII. 24). 

God is the Triune. Augustine confesses his belief in the Trinity in the sense estab- 
lished by Athanasius and adopted by the Church, and seeks by various analogies to render 
the conception more accessible to the common apprehension (De Civ. Dei, XI. 24: credi- 
mus et tenemus et fideliter praedicamus quod Pater genuerit Verbum, hoc est Sapientiam, per 
quam facta sunt omnia, unigenitum Filiwum, unus unum, aeternus coaeternwm, summe bonus 
aequaliter bonum, et quod Spiritus sanctus simul et Patris et ΕἸ sit Spiritus et ipse consub- 
stantialis et coaeternus ambobus, atque hoc totum et Trinitas sit propter proprietatem personarum 
et unus Deus propier inseparabilem divinitatem, sicut unus omnipotens propter inseparabilem 
omnipotentiam, ita tamen, ut etiam quum de singulis quaeritur, unusquisque eorum et Deus et 
omnipotens esse respondeatur, quum vero de omnibus simul, non tres dii vel tres omnipotentes, 
sed wnus Deus omnipotens; tanta ibi est in tribus inseparabilis unitas, quae sic se voluit praedi- 
cart). Augustine does not (with Gregory of Nyssa, Basilius, and others) conceive the 
relation of the three divine persons or hypostases to the unity of the divine essence 
as similar to the relation of finite individuals to their universal (7. 6., the relation of Peter, 
Paul, and Barnabas to the essence of man); the substance of the Godhead is realized fully 
and completely in each of the three persons (De Trin., VII. 11). Augustine repudiates, 
indeed, decidedly the heresy of the Sabellians, who with the unity of the essence of God 
affirmed also the unity of his person; but the analogies which he employs to illustrate the 
nature of the Trinity are taken from the sphere of individual existence; so, in particular, 
the analogy drawn from the combination of being, life, and knowledge in man (De Lib. Ard, 
II. 7), or, as Augustine afterward preferred to put it, the analogy from the union of 
being, knowledge, and love in man (Confess., XIII. 11; De Trin., IX. 4; De Civ. Dei, XI. 
26), or from memory, thought, and will, or, within the sphere of reason, from the con- 
sciousness of eternity, wisdom, and love of blessedness (De Trin., XI. 16; XV. 5 seq.), as 
also the analogy to the Trinity which he finds in all created things, in that they all unite 


- 


842 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 


in themselves being in general, their own particular being, and the orderly combination of 
the former (the universal) with the latter (the particular, De Vera Rel. 13: esse, species, 
ordo; cf. De Trin., XI.18: mensura, numerus, pondus). The trace of the Trinity appears, so 
far as this is consistent with the dignity of the latter, in all creatures (De Trin., VI. 10). 

The being of God is the highest and most complete form of being (summa essentia, 
summe est), and is therefore unchangeable (iémmutabilis). To the things which he created 
out of nothing he gave various degrees of being, but to none of them such being as his 
own. He assigned to them, also, a natural order (naturas essentiarum gradibus ordinavit, 
| De Civ. Dei, XII. 2 seq.). The opposite of God is not being, in any of its forms, but 
non-being, and evil which is related to the latter as its product (De Civ. Dei, XII. 2 seq.). 
The good God was free and subject to no necessity in creating the world, and his object 
was to create something good (De Civ. Dei, XI. 21 seq.). The world bears witness through 
its order and beauty to its divine authorship (i., XI. 4). God created it, not out of his 
own essence, for then it would have been equal with God, but out of nothing (De Civ. Dei, 
XI.10; Conjess., XII.7). As being creative substance, God is in all places (ubique diffusus). 
The preservation of the world is a continual creation. If God should withdraw from the 
world his creative power, it would straightway lapse into nothingness (De Civ. Dei, XII. 
25). His creative work is not an eternal one; for since the world is finite, it must be 
limited in time as in space. Yet we are not to conceive unlimited periods of time as having 
preceded the creation of the world, nor infinite spaces as existing outside of it; for time 
and space exist, not out of the world, but in and with it. Time is the measure of motion; 
but in the eternal there is no motion or change. The world, therefore, was created with 
time, rather than in time. But God’s design and resolve to create the world existed from 
eternity (De Civ. Dei, XI. 4 seq.). The world is not simple, as is all that is eternal, but 
manifold, though not without unity; the idea that many worlds exist is the product of an 
empty play of the imagination (De Ord., I. 3; De Civ. Dei, XV. 5). 

It was necessary that, in the order of the universe, that which is deemed mean and 
inferior should not be wanting (De Civ. Dei, XII. 4). We should not judge of things by 
the standard of their utility to us, nor hold that to be bad which is injurious to us, but 
should judge of each object according to its own nature; every thing has its measure, its 
form, and a certain harmony in itself. God is to be praised in view of all that exists (7b., 4 
seq.). All being, as such, is good (De Vera Rel., 21: in quantum est, quidquid est, bonum 
est). Even matter has its place in the general order of things; it was created by God; its 
excellence consists in its plasticity. The body is not the prison of the soul (De Vera 
Rel., 36). 

The soul is immaterial. There are found in it only functions, such as thought, know- 
ing, willing, and remembrance, but nothing which is material (De Trin., Χ. 13). It isa 
substance or subject, and not a mere attribute of the body (dbid., 15). It feels each affection 
of the body at that point where the affection takes place, without being obliged first to 
move itself to that place; it is therefore wholly present both in the entire body and in each 
part of it, whereas the corporeal is with each of its parts only in one place (Zp. 166 ad 
Hier.,4; Contra Ep. Man., ch. 16). Augustine distinguishes as faculties in the soul, memory, 
intellect, and will; all passions are manifestations of the will (De Civ. Dei, XIV. 6: voluntas 
est quippe in omnibus, immo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt). The relation of mem- 
ory, intellect, and will to the soul must not be conceived as analogous to the relation of 
color and figure to the body, or of accidents to the substratum in which they are found ; 
for accidents can extend no farther than their substrata (subjecta, imokecuéva)—the figure 
or color of one body cannot be those of another body. But the mind (mens) can, in 
loving, love both itself and that which is other than itself; in knowing, know itself 








SAINT AUGUSTINE, 343 


and that which is other than itself; hence memory, intellect, and will, share in the sub 
stantiality of the mind (De Trin., 1X. 4), although the latter, not 7s, but has, the faculties 
of memory, intellect, and love (ib., XV. 22). All these functions can be directed upon 
themselves, the understanding can know itself, memory can remember that we possess 
memory, the free will can make use of its freedom or not (De Lib. Arbiir., 11. 19). 
The immortality of the soul follows philosophically from its participation in immutable 
Truth, and from its essential union with the eternal reason and with life (Soli., 11. 2 seq.; 
De Imm. An., 1 seq.); sin robs it not of life, but only of blessedness (De Civ. Dei, VI. 12). 
Yet it is faith alone which authorizes the hope of true immortality, or of eternal life in God 
(De Trin., XIII. 12). (Cf. Plato’s argument in the Fep., X. p. 609, and the last argument in 
the Phaedo, above, p. 128). 

The cause of evil is to be found in the will, which turns aside from the higher to the | 
inferior, or in the pride of those angels and men who turned away from God, who has abso- 
lute being, to themselves, whose being was limited. Not that the inferior as such is evil, . 
but to decline to it from the higher is evil. The evil will works that which is evil, but is 
not itself moved by any positive cause; it has no causa efficiens, but only a causa deficiens 
(De Civ. Det, XII. 6 seq.). Evil is not a substance or nature (essence), but a marring of 
nature (the essence) and of the good, a ‘‘defect,” a ‘privation,” or “‘loss of good,” an 
infraction of integrity, of beauty, of happiness, of virtue; where there is no violation of 
good there is no evil (1886 vitiwm et non nocere non potest). Evil, therefore, can only exist | 
as an adjunct of good, and that, not of the immutably, but only of the mutably good. An 
absolute good is possible, but absolute evil is impossible (De Civ. Dei, XI. 22; XII. 3). 
Such was Augustine’s chief argument against Manichzism, which taught that evil was , 
equally original with good, and that it constituted a second essence side by side with the 
good. Evil, continues Augustine, does not disturb the order and beauty of the universe; it 
cannot wholly withdraw itself from subjection to the laws of God; it does not remain 
unpunished, and the punishment of it is good, inasmuch as thereby justice is executed; as 
a painting with dark colors rightly distributed is beautiful, so also is the sum of things 
beautiful for him who has power to view them all at one glance, notwithstanding the 
presence of sin, although, when considered separately, their beauty is marred by the 
deformity of sin (De Civ. Det, XI. 23; XII. 3; cf. De Vera Rel., 44: et est pulchritudo uni- 
versae creaturae per haec tria inculpabilis, damnationem peccatorum, exercitationem justorum, 
perfectionem beatorum). God would not have created those angels and men of whom he | 
knew beforehand that they would be wicked, if he had not also known how they would 
subserve the ends of goodness; the whole world thus consists, like a beautiful song, of 
oppositions (contrariorum oppositione saeculi pulchritudo componitur, De Civ. Dei, XI. 18). 
To these considerations Augustine attached so great an importance, that, unlike Origen 
and Gregory of Nyssa and others, he believed the doctrine of a general ἀποκατάστασις 
(or “‘restoration”) umnecessary in a theodicy. 

God created first the angels—a part of whom remained good, while the rest became 
evil—and then the visible world and man; the angels are the “light,” which God first 
ereated (De Civ. Dei, XI. 9). The human race began with one man, created in the beginning 
by God (2b., XII. 9). Not only they err, who (like Apuleius) hold that the world and man 
have always existed, but also those, who, on the authority of incredible writings, hold it to 
be historically demonstrated that they have existed many thousands of years, since it 
appears from the Holy Scriptures that it is not yet six thousand years since man was 
created (ib., XII. 10). The shortness of this period is not sufficient to render the biblical 
statement incredible; for if, instead of six thousand, a countless number of thousands of 
years had passed since man’s creation, the number would still vanish, in comparison with 


344 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 


the previous eternity, in which God had not created man, into nothingness—like a drop 
compared with the ocean, or rather in a manner incomparably more absolute (ib., XII. 12). 
| The (Stoic) belief, that after its destruction the world is renewed, and that all events repeat 
themselves in successive world-periods, is altogether false; Christ has died only once, and 
will not again enter into the bonds of death, and we shall in the future be eternally in the 
presence of God (ἐῤ., XII. 13 seq.). 

The first man contained, not indeed visibly, but in the foreknowledge of God, the 
germ of two human communities, the secular state and the city of God; for from him were 
to spring the men, of whom some were to be united with the evil angels in punishment, 
and the rest with the good angels in receiving rewards, according to the hidden, yet 
just, decree of God, whose grace cannot be unjust, and whose justice cannot be cruel (De 
Civ. Dei, XII. 27). Through the fall of man, which was the result of disobedience to the 
divine command, man became subject to death as his just punishment (ib., XIII. 1).- Of 
death, however, there are two kinds, namely, the death of the body, when the soul quits 
it, and the death of the soul, when it is abandoned of God; the latter is not an absolute 
cessation of existence and life, but the cessation of life from God. Death in the first sense 
is indeed in itself an evil, but for the good it works only good; the second death, which is 
the summum malum, comes only to the bad. The body, as well as the soul, of man is des- 
tined to rise again. The bodies of the righteous will be transfigured and become more 
noble than was the body of the first man betore the fall. The bodies of the wicked, on 
the contrary, will be given over to everlasting suffering (ib., XIII. 2 seq.). Since Adam 
had forsaken God, he was forsaken of God, and death in every sense was the punishment 
with which he was threatened (tb., XIII. 12, 15); voluntarily depraved and justly con- 
demned, he begot depraved and condemned children; for we were all in him, when “‘all of 
us" consisted of him alone; the form in which we were to live as individuals had not yet 
been created and communicated to us, but there was already existent in Adam the natura 
seminalis from which we were to arise, and since this nature was stained with sin, given 
over to death, and justly condemned, the same character was transmitted to the posterity 
of Adam. Through the misuse of man’s free will arose this prolonged mischief which is 
leading the human race, radically corrupted, through a series of sufferings to eternal death, : 
with the exception only of those who are redeemed by God’s grace (ib., XIII. 14; cf. XXT. 
12: hinc est universa generis humant massa damnata, quoniam qui hoc primitus admisit, cum ea 
quae in illo fuerat radicata sua stirpe punitus est, ut nullus ab hoc justo debitoque supplicio, nisi 
masericordia et indebita gratia liberetur). These theses seem to involve, with reference to 
the origin of human souls, the doctrine of Generationism or Traducianism, to which Augus- 
tine was in fact inclined on account of his doctrine of original sin; yet he never took ground 
decidedly in its favor, but only rejected the doctrine of pre-existence as erroneous, and 
with it renounced the Platonic doctrine of learning as a species of reminiscence (De Quant. 
An., 20); nor did he express his disapproval of Creationism, according to which each soul 
is the result of a special creative act on God’s part, but remained undecided to the end 
(Retract., I. 1. 3 seq.; ef. De Trin., XII. 15). Adam did not sin from a motive of mere 
Τ sensual pleasure, but, like the angels, from pride (7b., XIV. 3; 13). Human nature, ruined 
by the original sin, can be restored only by its author (XIV. 11). For the purpose of this 
restoration Christ appeared. Looking forward to redemption, God permitted the temptation 
and fall of the first man, although it was in his power to cause that neither an angel nor a 
man should sin; but he would not remove the question of their remaining holy or becoming 
sinful from their own voluntary decision, in order that it might be shown how much evil 
their pride and how much good his grace could accomplish (XIV. 21). Voluntary service 
is better than involuntary; our mission is to serve God freely (servire liberaliter Deo). 








SAINT AUGUSTINE. 345 


The freedom of the will is only by grace and in it. The first freedom of the will, the free- 
dom of Adam, was the ability not to sin (posse non peccare), but the highest freedom, that of 
the saved, will be the inability to sin (non posse peccare, De Corr. et Grat., 33). By grace the 
will is made holy; the will follows grace as its servant. It is certain that we act, when we 
act, but the fact that we act, that we believe, will, and execute, is due to God, who communi- 
cates to us the necessary active powers. Man does nothing good, except as God by his work- 
ing causes him to do it. God himself is our might (potestas nostra ipse est, Solil., II. 1; ef. De 
Gratia Christi, 26 et al.). The doctrine of Pelagius (who, according to Aug. de Praedest. 
Sanct., ch. 18, says: ‘‘praesciebat Deus, qui futuri essent sancti et immaculati per liberae volun- 
tatis arbitrium et ideo eos ante mundi constitutionem in ipsa sua praescientia, qua tales futuros 
esse praescivit, elegit”) involves a misapprehension of the fact that this self-determination is 
conditioned upon the irresistible grace of God, and it is not in harmony with Holy Scripture. 
Cf., besides the above-mentioned (p. 334) work of Wiggers, especially J. L. Jacobi’s Die Lehre 
des Pelagius, Leips. 1842; and Friedr. Worter, Der Pelagianismus nach seinem Ursprung und 
seiner Lehre, Freib. in Br., 1866. Augustine’s last works: De Praedestinatione Sanctorum and 
De Dono Perseverantiae, are directed against the semi-Pelagian doctrine, as held especially 
by Cassianus, who admitted that man can accomplish nothing good without grace, but 
ascribed the beginning of every good work, which God’s grace alone could bring to com- 
pletion, to thé free will of man himself, and could not admit that God would save only a 
portion of the human race and that Christ died only for the elect. Augustine, on the 
contrary, maintained the doctrine of all-determining, antecedeat grace, and that even the 
commencement of good in man is dependent on such grace. St. Jerome (on whom com- 
pare, among others, Otto Zéckler, Gotha, 1865, and A. Thierry, St. Jérome et St. Augustin, 
Paris, 1867) says in the Dialogus contra Pelagianos (composed A.D. 415): Man can determine 
himself in favor of good or evil, but it is only with the assistance of grace that he can 
accomplish the good. 

God’s grace having from the beginning withdrawn a part of the human race from the gen- 
eral ruin, there thus arose by the side of the earthly state, the state or city of God (De Civ. 
Dei, X1V. 28). Of these two societies, the one is predestinated to reign eternally with God, 
the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil (Zbid., XV.1). The whole period of the 
life of men is the period of the development (excursus) of these two states (Ibid., XV. 1). 
Augustine distinguishes, sometimes three, sometimes six periods within the history of man. 
Men lived at first without law, and then no attempt was made by them to oppose the lust 
of this world; next under the law, when opposition was attempted, but without success; and 
finally, under grace, the period of opposition and victory. But of the six periods, the first ex- 
tends from Adam to Noah, Cain and Abel being the representatives of the two “states;” it 
ends by being buried up in the flood, just as, in the history of individual man, the period of 
childhood is buried in oblivion. The second period extends from Noah to Abraham, and 
may be compared to the period of boyhood in man; as a punishment for man’s arrogance, 
the confusion of tongues at Babel took place, only the people of God preserving the primi- 
tive language. The third period reaches from Abraham to David, and is the period of the 
youth of humanity; the law is now given, but still more distinctly sound the divine 
promises. The fourth period, that of the manhood of humanity, extends from David to 
the Babylonish captivity ; it is the time of the kings and prophets. The fifth period covers 
the time from the Babylonish captivity to Christ; prophecy now ceases, and the deepest 
humiliation of Israel begins precisely at the time when, the temple having been rebuilt 
and the nation released from the Babylonish captivity, it had hoped for a better condition. 
The sixth period begins with Christ and will end with all earthly history; it is the period of 
grace, of the struggle and victory of believers, and terminates with the introduction of the 


346 GREEK FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE’S TIME. 


eternal Sabbath, when all struggling will end in repose and time will be swallowed up in 
eternity, when the citizens of the divine city will rejoice in everlasting salvation, and the 
commonwealth of this world will be given over to eternal damnation, so that history closes 
with a separation which is irreversible and eternal. Augustine made the history of the 
Israelites the basis of this philosophy of history, and according to its periods he determined 
those of the world’s history in general. Of the other nations he notices, besides the 
Oriental nations, especially the Greek—among whom, he says, their kings introduced the 
worship of false gods before the time of Joshua, and poets deified distinguished men and 
rulers or natural objects—and the Romans, whose history he describes as beginning contem- 
poraneously with the destruction of the Assyrian nation, while the prophets were living in 
Israel. Rome, says Augustine, was the Western Babylon, stained at its very origin by 
fratricide, and gradually increased through lust of dominion and avarice, and through 
ostensible virtues, which were, rather, vices (XIX. 25), to an unnatural, gigantic magni- 
tude. In the time of its supremacy over the nations, Christ was to be born, in whom the 
prophecies made to the people of Israel find their accomplishment, and all races of men are 
blessed (De Civ. Dei, XV. seq.). 

Augustine distinguishes seven stadia in the progress of the individual soul to God; 
but it is only in his early years that he treated of this subject. In defining these stadia, 
he assumes the Aristotelian doctrine as his guide, but (following the analogy of the Neo- 
Platonic doctrine of the higher virtues) goes further than that doctrine would lead him. 
The stadia are marked by: 1) the vegetative forces, 2) the animal forces (including memory 
and imagination), 3) the rational force, on which the development of the arts and sciences 
depends, 4) virtue, as the purification of the soul attained by struggling against sensual 
pleasure and by faith in God, 5) security in goodness, 6) attaining unto God, 7) the eternal 
vision of God (De Quant. An., 72 seq.). In the vision of God we arrive at complete like- 
ness to God, whereby we do not indeed become Gods, nor like God himself, but his image 
is restored in us (De Trin., XIII. 12; XIV. 24). 

Augustine combais decidedly and in numerous passages the doctrine, that all pun- 
ishments are intended to serve merely for the purification of those who are punished; 
they are needed as a proof of the divine justice; it would not be unjust if all men were 
eternally punished; but since the divine mercy must also be manifested, some are saved, 
though only a minority; the far larger number of men remain under punishment, in order 
that it may be shown what was due to all (De Civ. Dei, XXI. 12). No man of sound faith 
can say, that even the evil angels must be saved through God’s compassion, for which 
reason also the Church does not pray for them; but he who should be led by a misplaced 
sympathy to believe in the salvation of all men, ought, from the same motive, to believe in 
the salvation of the wicked angels also; the Church makes request, indeed, for all men, 
but only because she does not know with certainty of any individual, whether God has 
appointed him to salvation or to damnation, and because the time for saving repentance is 
still present; if she knew with certainty who they are, that ‘‘ praedestinati sunt in aeternum 
tgnem tre cum diabolo,” she would no more pray for them than for the devil (De Civ. Dei, 
XXI. 24). Thus Augustine maintains the dualism of good and evil in respect of the 
end of the world’s development as decidedly, as, in opposing Manichzism, he combats the 
dualistic doctrine, when applied to the principle of all being (which doctrine-,he meets with 


the theory of a gradation in the orders of existences). 5 BO Ay εἰ -- ε 7 


§ 87. The philosophy of the Christian Church in the Grant was 
founded, in the later Patristic period, on a combination of Platonic 
and Neo-Platonic and, to some extent, also of Aristotelian ideas 








GREEK FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE’S TIME. 347 


with Christian Dogmatics. Synesius of Cyrene, born A. p. 375, ad- 
hered, even after his consecration as a Christian priest and bishop, to 
the essential, fundamental idea of Neo-Platonism, and regarded that 
portion of the Christian dogmas which was not in accordance there- 
with as constituting a sacred allegory. Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa 
in Phenicia, and probably a younger contemporary of Synesius, like- 
wise stands, in his work on the nature of the soul, on the ground of 
the Platonic and in part also on that of the Aristotelian philosophy, 
teaching the pre-existence of the human soul and the unending dura- 
tion of the world, though rejecting other Platonic doctrines. He 
defends the theory of the freedom of the will against the doctrine of 
fatalism. -Aineas of Gaza, on the contrary, disputes in his dialogue 
“ Theophrastus” (composed about 487) the doctrine of the pre-exist- 
ence of the human soul, as also that of the eternity of the world. 
Among the opponents of the latter doctrine in the sixth century may 
be named also the Bishop of Mitylene, Zacharias Scholasticus, and 
the commentator of Aristotle, Johannes Philoponus of Alexandria, 
which latter person, by extending the Aristotelian doctrine that sub- 
stantial existence is to be predicated in the fullest sense only of indi- 
viduals, to the dogma of the Trinity, incurred the accusation of 
Tritheism. To the period when Neo-Platonic opinions could expect to 
be received only under the garb of Christianity—probably the end of 
the fifth century—belong the writings which their author designates 
as the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, of Athens, one of the imme- 
diate disciples of the Apostles. It is ina great measure the kind of 
speculation contained in these works which is continued in the writ- 
ings of Maximus the Confessor (580-662), a profound, mystical theolo- 
gian. John of Damascus, who lived in the eighth century, gives, in his 
work on the “ Source of Knowledge,’ a brief account of (the Aristo- 
telian) Ontology, then a refutation of heresies, and finally a minute 
and systematic exposition of Orthodox Dogmatics. The purpose of 
John in the entire work is, according to his express declaration, not to 
advance anything original, but only to sum up and present what has 
been said by holy and learned men. Accordingly, he does not labor 
for the further development of Christian doctrine, which he regards as 
already substantially complete, but only collocates and arranges the 
thoughts of his predecessors, employing philosophy, and more espe- 
cially logic and ontology, as an instrument in the service of theology, 
and thus illustrating already the principle of Scholasticism. 


848 GREEK FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE'S TIME. 


The works of Synesius were published by Turnebus, at Paris, in 1553, and by Dionysius Petavius, 
Paris, 1612, 1631, 1633. Single works of his have been often published, in particular, the Calvitii Enco- 
mion, Stuttgart, 1834, and “ Die dgypt. Erz. iiber die Vorsehung.,” Sulzbach, 1835, by Krabinger, and the 
Hymns, by Gregoire and Collombat, Lyons, 1836; also in the 15th volume of the Sylloge Poetarwm G@r., by 
J. F. Boissonade, Paris, 1823-1832, Works upon him have been written by Aem. Th. Clausen (De Synesio 
Philosopho, Libyae Pentapoleos Metropolita, Copenhagen, 1831), Thilo (Comm. in Synes. Hymnum See., 
ewei Universitatsprogramme, Halle, 1842 and 1843), and Bernh. Kolbe (Der Bischof Synesius von Cyrene, 
Berlin, 1850); ef. also Franz Xaver Kraus (Studien tiber Syn. von Kyrene, in the Theol. Quartalschr. 
1865, No. 8, pp. 881-448, and No. 4, pp. 537-600). 

Nemesii περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου pr. ed. graec. et lat. a Nicasio Ellebodio, Antwerp, 1565; ed. J. Fell, 
Oxford, 1671° ed. Ch. Fr. Matthei, Leipsic, 1802, Nemes iiber die Freiheit, translated from the Greek by 
Filleborn in his Beitr. zur Gesch. der Philos. 1.. Zullichau, 1791. Nemesius tiber die Natur des Menschen, 
German transl. by Osterhammer, Salzburg, 1819. 

Aeneae Gazaei Theophrastus, ed. J. Wolf, Zitrich, 1560; Aen. Gaz. et Zach. Mityl. de immortalitate 
animae et mortalitate universi, ejusdem dial. de opif. mundi, ed. C. Barth, Leipsic, 1655. Αἰνείας καὶ 
Ζαχαρίας. Aeneas Gazaeus et Zacharias Mitylenueus de immortalitate animae et consummatione 
mundi, ed. J. F. Boissonade, Paris, 1836. On Aineas of Gaza compare the work of Wernsdorf (Naumburg, 
1816), and his Disp. de Aen. G. ed. adorn., prefixed to the edition of Boissonade. 

Concerning the editions of the writings of John Philop., see above, § 70, p. 256. Cf. the article by 
Trechsel, in the Theol. Stud. wu. Kritiken, 1835, Article I. 

The works attributed to Dionysius Areopagita, De Divinis Nominibus, De Theologia Mystica, De 
Coelesti Hierarchia, De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, (decem) Epistolae, were first printed in Greek as Dion. 
Areopag. Opera, at Basel, 1539, and afterward at Venice, 1558, Paris, 1562; ed. Lanselius, Paris, 1615; ed. 
Balthas. Corderius, Antwerp, 1634, the latter edition reproduced at Paris in 1644, Brixen, 1554, last in 
Migne’s collection; German by J. G. V. Engelhardt (Die angeblichen Schriften des Areopagiten Dionysius 
iibersetzt und mit Abhandlungen begleitet, Sulzbach, 1823), who also reproduces the essay of Dallaeus 
(Geneva, 1664) concerning the age of the author of the Areopagitic writings ; cf. L. F. O. Baumgarten-Crusius, 
De Dionys. Areopag., Jena, 1828, also in his Opuse. theol., Jena, 1836; Karl Vogt, Neuplatonismus und 
Christenthum, Berlin, 1836; F. Hipler, Dionysius der Areop., Regensburg, 1861; Ed. Bohmer, D. A., in the 
Review entitled Damasis, 1864, No. 2. 

Maximi Confessoris opera, ed. Combefisius, Paris, 1675. Maximi Confessoris de variis difficili- 
busque locis s. patrum Dionysié et Gregorii librum, ed. Fr. Oehler, Halle, 1857. 

Johannis Damasceni opera in lat. serm. conversa per Billium, Paris, 1577; Opera quae extant, ed. 
Le Quien, Paris, 1712. 


Synesius was a Neo-Platonist before he became a Christian. The female philosopher, 
Hypatia (see above, § 69, p. 254), was his instructress, and his relations with her continued 
friendly after his conversion. After he had accepted Christianity and been designated by 
Theophilus the Patriarch of Alexandria, as Bishop of Ptolemais, he frankly declared to 
Theophilus that he did not in all points assent to the teaching of the Church. He did not 
believe in the final destruction of the world, was inclined to favor the doctrine of the pre- 
existence of the soul, believed, indeed, in the immortality of the soul, but considered the 
doctrine of the resurrection as merely a sacred allegory; he promised, nevertheless, in his 
doctrinal teachings to accommodate himself to the dogmas generally accepted, holding that 
the people had need of myths, that pure, unfigured truth was capable of being known only 
by a few, and would only serve to dazzle and blind the spiritual eyes of the multitude 
(Epist., 95, p. 236 A, ed. Petav.). This same aristocracy of intelligence, which was in conflict 
with the common spirit of the Christian Church, appears in his poetical works, composed 
when, notwithstanding the confession above mentioned, the episcopal dignity had been con- 
ferred upon him. More in the Neo-Platonic than in the Christian manner he conceives 
God as the unity of unities, the monad of monads, the indifference of contraries, which, 
after ‘‘super-existent” throes, was poured forth through its first-born form in an unspeak- 
able manner, received a triple-headed energy, and as super-existent source was crowned by 
the beauty of the children which, issued from the middle, collect in numbers around that 
middle. After this exposition, however, Synesius enjoins silence on the too audacious 








GREEK FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE’S TIME. 349 


lyre; it must not proclaim to the people the most mysterious of sacred things (the 
priority of the Monad before the three persons of the Godhead?). The Holy Ghost, 
divided without division, having entered into matter, the world thus received its form and 
motion. The Holy Ghost is present also in those who fell to earth, as the power which 
shall raise them up again to heaven. 

Nemesius, who lived about A. Ὁ. 450—according to others, 400—occupies also substan- 
tially the Neo-Platonie stand-point; the Aristotelian element in his writings is only of 
subordinate importance, and determines more the form than the content of his philoso- 
phizing. His investigations are chiefly of a psychological nature. For him, as for Plato, 
the soul is an immaterial substance, involved in incessant and self-produced motion. From 
it the body receives its motion. The soul existed before it entered the body. It is eternal, 
like all supra-sensible things. It is not true that new souls are constantly coming into 
existence, whether by generation or by direct creation. The opinion is also false, that the 
world is destined to be destroyed, when the number of souls shall have become complete; 
God will not destroy what has been well put together. Nemesius rejects, nevertheless, 
the doctrine of a world-soul and of the migration of the human soul through the bodies 
of animals. In considering the separate faculties of the soul, and also in his doctrine of 
the freedom of the will, Nemesius follows largely Aristotle. Every species of animals, he 
says, possesses definite instincts, by which alone its actions are determined; but the actions 
of man are infinitely varied. Placed midway between the sensible and the supra-sensible 
worlds, man’s business is to decide by means of his reason in which direction he will 
turn; that is his freedom. 

ffneas of Gaza, a pupil at Alexandria of Hierocles the Neo-Platonist, and Zacharias of 
Mitylene approved only those Neo-Platonic doctrines which were in accordance with 
Christian Dogma. 

In the same limited way, Johannes Philoponus (whose works were written between 
500 and 570), a pupil of Ammonius Hermiz (see above, § 70, pp. 255, 256, 259), attempted, 
though with imperfect success, to follow Aristotle. He laid stress (in distinction from 
Simplicius and other Neo-Platonists) upon the difference between the Platonic and Aristo- 
telian doctrines. The Ideas, he taught, are the creative thoughts of God, which, as arche- 
types, can and must have existed before their temporal copies. 

In the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts xvii. 34), who was reputed to 
have been first Bishop of Athens, the attempt is made to blend the dominant ideas in Neo- 
Platonism with the Christian doctrine. ‘ After that the doctrine of the Church had been 
developed and had become the common property of all believers, there were men, to whom 
this, which all, including the most superficial, could believe, seemed for this reason insuffi- 
cient, and who sought therefore for a faith resting on a profounder basis. Besides, heathen 
philosophy, as it made its way anew and more extensively than ever before among the 
Christians, furnished necessarily new food for doubt and consequently for mysticism ” 
(Ritter). 

The first mention of the Areopagitic writings is found in a letter of Innocentius, the 
Bishop of Maronia, in which he refers to a conference that had been held at Constan- 
tinople in the year 532, at the command of the Emperor Justinian—Hypatius, the Metro- 
politan of Ephesus, | presiding—with the Severians (known as a sect of moderate 
Monophysites, who admitted that Christ was κατὰ σάρκα ὁμοούσιος ἡμῖν͵ but were opposed 
by the more rigid Monophysites as φθαρτολάτραι). The Severians appealed to passages in 
the writings of Cyrillus, Athanasius, Felix, Julius, Gregorius Thaumaturgus, and also of 
Dionysius Areopagita (whose work scarcely touches upon the questions there in dispute, 
although it contains some of the expressions used at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the 


350 GREEK FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE’S TIME. 


expressed purpose of the author being rather to further the positive development of doe- 
trine than to condemn opponents, in which particular he conformed to the spirit of the 
imperial Henotikon issued in 482). Hypatius, the spokesman of the Catholics, disputed 
the genuineness of the works imputed to Dionysius, which neither Cyril nor Athanasius 
and others had known. Afterward, however, these works gained credit in the Catholic 
Church, especially after the Roman Popes Gregory, Martin, and Agatho had cited them in 
their writings and appealed to their authority. The commentary on them composed by 
the orthodox abbot, Maximus Confessor, strengthened their authority. They exerted a 
not inconsiderable influence over the Scholastic Philosophy of Western Europe after their 
translation by Scotus Erigena; from them the Mystics of the Middle Ages drew chiefly the 
substance of their opinions. Their inauthenticity was first asserted by Laurentius Valla, 
and afterward demonstrated by Morinus, Dallzus, and others. The only question remain- 
ing for us, therefore, concerns the time of their composition, and not their spuriousness; 
they date probably from the last decades of the fifth century. To set back the date of 
Pseudo-Dionysius from the second half of the fifth century into the first half of the fourth, 
is in contradiction with the general historical development of Christian thought, and can 
only win a semblance of historic legitimacy, when, neglecting the general view, the regard 
is fixed only on single passages in the earlier Church Fathers, which, because they remind 
modern savants of similar passages in Dionysius, are declared to be in fact derived from the 
latter, and to prove an acquaintance on the part of their authors with the works in question; 
while, in fact, these correspondences are explained partly by the common Platonic and Neo- 
Platonic basis on which all these writers stand, and partly by a common influence tending 
in the opposite direction. The Neo-Platonic influence is quite unmistakable; but the form 
of Neo-Platonism manifested in it, though chiefly Plotinic, yet betrays also (as Erdmann, 
among others, rightly affirms) the influence of the later members of the school, especially 
Jamblichus and Proclus, with both of whom Pseudo-Dionysius agrees in the doctrine that 
the One is exalted, not simply above the νοῦς and the ideas (οὐσία), but also above goodness 
itself. The description of God, as restoring the divided multitude of created things to 
unity, as substituting for universal war undifferentiated union through participation in the 
divine peace (De Div. Nom., ch. 11), suggests Proclus’ doctrine of the μονῇ, πρόοδος and 
ἐπιστροφῇ (see above, § 70, p. 257). Not while the effort was being made to determine the 
fundamental outlines of a system, but only after a corpus doctrinae, fixed in all or nearly 
all of its most important points, had once been developed, become traditional, and arrived 
at assured supremacy, could this whole, as such, within the limits of the Church, be at once 
acknowledged and denied, or reduced to a merely symbolical significance in the manner 
illustrated by Pseudo- Dionysius. 

Dionysius distinguishes between affirmative theology, which, descending from God to the 
finite, contemplates God as the being to whom all names belong, and ubstracting theology, 
which, following the way of negation, ascends again from the finite to God and considers 
him as the nameless being, superior to all positive and negative predicates. Following the 
Jatter method, the soul, after completing its ascent into that region of being which, from its 
very sublimity, is to the impotent human intellect a region of obscurity, becomes com- 
pletely passive, the voice is stilled, and man becomes united with the Unspeakable (De 
Theol. Myster., ch. 3). “Affirmative theology” formed the subject of the theological 
treatises—mentioned by Dionysius, De Div. Nom., chs. 1 and 2, and De Theol Myst., ch. 3, 
but not now extant—in which the unity and trinity of God were treated of, the Father 
being considered as the original source of deity, Jesus and the Holy Ghost as his branches, 
and in which the entrance of the ‘‘super-essential” Jesus into true human nature is 
described, by which act, it is said, he became an essence. The same is true of the work 











GREEK FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE'S TIME. ODL. 


4 


entitled: De Divinis Nominibus—in which the spiritual or ‘‘intelligible” names of God 
were discussed, all of these names being vindicated as applicable to the whole Trinity— 
and of the work on Symbolical Theology (also lost), which treated of those names of God 
which are derived by analogy from the sensuous world. ‘‘ Abstracting theology” is con- 
tained in the short work entitled, De Theologia Mystica, which forms a negative termina- 
tion to the system. The Celestial Hierarchy of Angels and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy as its 
image, are considered in the two works bearing those titles. 

In the work on the Names of God Dionysius mentions with approval the doctrine of 
‘certain of our divine and holy teachers,” by whom a distinction was made between two 
forms of goodness and deity, the one being supra-good and supra-divine—or transcendent 
in its attributes—and the other being ideally good and divine. The former was a gift from 
God, and was endowed with the power to create good, which power it exercised by the 
creation of the second form of goodness and deity above specified. God, the Invisible, was, 
according to the same doctrine, the author also of those providences and dispensations of 
goodness which fall in superabundant fullness to the lot of all existing things, and so, in 
reality, the Cause of all things was exalted above all, and the super-existent and super- 
natural was superior to every form of nature or essence (De Nom. Div., ch. 11). The supra- 
essential One limits the existing One and all number, and is itself the cause and principle of 
the One and of number and, at the same time, the number and the order of all that exists. 
Hence the Deity, who is exalted above all things, is praised as a Monad and as a Triad, but 
is unknown to us or to any one, whether as Monad or as Triad; in order truly to praise the 
supra-unified in him and his divine creative power, we apply to him not only the triadic 
and monadic names, but call him the nameless One, the supra-essential, to indicate that he 
transcends the category of being. No Monad or Triad, no number, no unity, no genera- 
tion, nothing which exists or is known by those who exist can enable us to comprehend the 
mysterious nature of the supra-essentially supra-exalted supra-Deity. He has no name, no 
concept. The region which he inhabits is inaccessible to us. He transcends all things. We 
do not even ascribe to him the attribute of goodness, as though that were adequate to 
express his nature, but filled with longing to understand and to say something of his 
ineffable nature, we consecrate to him first the most holy and reverend name; and in this, 
no doubt, we are in accord with the Holy Scriptures, but we remain far removed from the 
truth of the case. For this reason the Scriptures have also preferred the way of negation, 
which withdraws the soul from that which is akin to it and carries it through all divine 
intelligences, above which is placed that Nameless One who is exalted above all concep- 
tion, all name, and all knowledge (De Div. Nom., ch. 13). 

Whatever proceeds from him who is the cause of all things is comprehended by Diony- 
sius under the denomination of the Good (De Div. Nom., ch. 5). In God exist the arche- 
types (ideas) of all existing things. The Holy Scriptures call these archetypes προορισμούς. 
The Good is a term of wider extension than Existence, for it includes both the existent and 
the non-existent, and is superior to both. The nature of evil is negative. If evil, as evil, 
positively subsisted, it would be evil to itself and would, therefore, destroy itself. The 
name of the existent extends to all that is, and it is exalted above all being; existence 
extends farther than life. The name life applies to all that lives and is exalted above all 
that lives; life extends farther than wisdom. The name of wisdom applies to all that is 
spiritual and endowed with reason or sensation, and is exalted above all these. To the 
question why it is that the realm of life is higher and nearer to God than the realm of 
(mere) existence, the realm of sensation than the realm of (mere) life, the realm of under- 
standing than the realm of (mere) feeling, and why, finally, the realm of spirits (véec) is 
higher than the realm of (mere) understanding, Dionysius answers that this is because that 


352 LATIN FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE'S TIME. 


which is most richly endowed by God must be better than all else and exalted above all else; 
but it is the spirit which has received the richest endowments, since both being and life and 
feeling and thought belong to it, etc. (De Div. Nom., chs. 4 and 5). (In this answer Diony- 
sius ranks as highest that which possesses the greatest wealth of attributes, after the 
manner of Aristotle; and yet within the spheres of the ideal and supra-ideal Dionysius 
gives the first place to that which is most abstract or to that which possesses the greatest 
extension and the least content. In this he follows Plato, but does not succeed better 
than Proclus or any other of his Neo-Platonic predecessors, in the attempt to carry 
through to its logical end either the one or the other of these opposite tendencies of 
thought.) 

Maximus Confessor (580-662), who, as an opponent of the Monotheletes and on account 
of his steadfast endurance of persecution, enjoyed great consideration in the Church, fol- 
lows in the main Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius. He taught that God had revealed 
himself through nature and by his word. The incarnation of God in Christ was the cul- 
mination of revelation, and would therefore have taken place even if man had not fallen. 
When God became man, man was made God (θέωσις). The universe will end in the union 
of all things with God. 

The monk, Johannes Damascenus, who lived about 700 A. D., brought together, with 
the aid of the Aristotelian Logic and Ontology, all the teachings of the Church in a sys- 
tematic and orderly form. The authority of his work is still great in the East; the later 
Scholastics of Western Europe also stood under his influence in their expositions of theo- 
logical doctrine. 


§ 88. The history of philosophical speculation in the Western por- 
tion of the Church during the period immediately following the death 
of Saint Augustine, is for the most part connected with the names of 
Claudianus Mamertus, Marcianus Capella, Boéthius, and Cassiodorus. 
Claudianus Mamertus, a Presbyter at Vienne in Gaul, defended, 
about the middle of the fifth century, from the Augustinian stand-point 
and against Faustus the Semi-Pelagian, the doctrine of the imma- 
teriality of the human soul, which latter, he taught, was subject only 
to motion in time, but not to motion in space. Marcianus Capella 
wrote about 480 a compendium of the septem artes liberales, which 
became very influential in the Middle Ages. , Anicius Manlius Tor- 
quatus Severinus Boéthius was educated by Neo-Platonists, and 
labored zealously and successfully for the preservation of ancient 
science and culture in the Christian Church, through his transla- 
tions of and commentaries on various works of Aristotle, Porphyry, 
Euclid, Nicomachus, Cicero, and others, and through his additions 
to them, as also through his work, founded on Neo-Platonic prin- 
ciples and entitled De Consolatione Philosophiae. A contemporary of 
Boéthius, Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, the Senator, opposed, like 
Claudianus Mamertus, in his work De Anima the hypothesis of the 
materiality of the rational human soul and defended the doctrine of 











LATIN FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE'S TIME. 353 


the likeness of the soul to God; he wrote also concerning Instruction 
in Theology and on the liberal arts and sciences, following in this 
more particularly the lead of Boéthius, of whose more extended works 
he prepared an epitome for didactic purposes. On the works of 
these men were founded those of Isidorus Hispalensis (about 600), 
Beda Venerabilis (about 700), and Alcuin (about 800). 


The work of Claudianus Mamertus, De Statu Animae, was edited by Petrus Mosellanus (Basel, 1520) 
and Casp. Barth (Cygn. 1655). 

The Satyricon of Marcianus Capella has been often published, more recently, in particular, by Frana 
Eyssenhardt, Leips. 1866. Cf. E. G. Graff, Old High German translation and explanation of M. C.’s two 
books De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, made about the beginning of the eleventh century, Berlin, 1838, 
and Hattemer, Notkers W., II., pp. 257-872. On M.C. and his satire see C. Bottger in Jahn’s Archiv, vol. 
18, 1847, pp. 591-622, Prantl treats of his Logical Compendium in his Gesch. d. Log., I. 672-679. 

The work of Boéthius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, was first published at Nuremberg in 1473; a 
more recent edition is that of Obbarius, Jen., 1848; his Works were printed at Venice in 1492 and at Basel 
in 1546 and 1570; for the old High German translation of the Consol., published by Graffand Von Hattemer, 
see below, § 91. Of him write, especially, Fr. Nitzsch (Das System des Poéthius, Berlin, 1860); cf. Schenkl 
in Verh. der 18 Vers. deutscher Philologen und Schulmdnmer, Vienna, 1859, pp. 76-92, on the relation of 
Boéthius and his works to Christianity, and concerning his logic, see Prantl, Gesch. d. Log., I. 679-722. 

The works of Cassiodorus were published by Jo. Garetius, Rouen, 1679, and at Venice, 1729; the 
last part of the De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum was first edited and published by A. 
Mai, Rome, 1881. On Cassiodorus, ef. F. D. de St. Marthe (Paris, 1695), Buat (in AbA. der Bair., Akad. 
d. W., I. p. 19 seq.), Stiudlin (in Airchenhist. Archiv fiir 1825, p. 259 seq.), Prantl (Gesch. der Log., I. pp. 
722-724). 

The Encyclopaedia of Isidorus Hispalensis, under the title: Originwm s. Etymologiarum Libri XX., 
was edited and published at Augsburg in 1472, 6. notis Jac. Gothofredi, in Auct. Lat., p. 811 seq., and 
recently at Leipsic, 1883, ed. by E. V. Otto. The work De Nat. Rerum, ed. by Gust. Becker, Berlin, 1S57, 
the Opera, ed. by De Ja Bigne, Paris, 1580, by Jac. du Breul, Paris, 1601, Cologne, 1617, and in more modern 
times by Faustinus Arevalus, in seven volumes, Rome, 1797-1803, and lastly in Migne’s Putrol. Cursus 
Completus. On his logic compare Prantl, Gesch. der Log., 11. pp. 10-14. 

The works of Beda Venerabilis were printed at Paris in 1521 and 1544, and at Cologne in 1612 and 
1688. A. Giles, The Complete Works of the Venerable Bede in the Original Latin, 12 vols., London, 
1848-44; Carmina, edited by H. Meyer, Leips. 1885, 

Alcuin’s works have been published by Quercetanus (Duchesne), Paris, 1617, and Frobenius, Ratisb. 
1777. On him ef. F. Lorenz (Alcwin’s Leben, Halle, 1829), Monnier (Alewin et son influence littéraire, 
relig. et polit., Paris, 1853), and Prantl (Gesch. der Log., II., pp. 14-17); concerning his pupil, Rhabanus 
Maurng, ef. F. H. Chr. Schwarz (De Rhabano Mauro primo Germaniae praeceptore, Heidelb., 1811), and 
Prantl (@esch. d. Log., 11. p. 19 seq.); ef. below, § 91. 


The philosophical importance of Claudianus Mamertus (Presbyter at Vienne in the 
Dauphinée; died ca. 477) is founded on his argumentation in favor of the immortality of the 
soul. Tertullian had once asserted the materiality of God, but this opinion had long been 
given up, yet even as late asca.350 a. D., Hilarius, the Athanasian and Bishop of Poitiers 
(mentioned above, § 85, p. 327), affirmed that in distinction from God all created things, 
including, therefore, the human soul, were material. This doctrine was afterward main- 
tained by Cassianus, the chief founder of Semi-Pelagianism—a doctrine which sought to 
mediate between the Augustinian and Pelagian stand-points—by Faustus, Bishop of 
Regium in Gaul, and one of the most prominent Semi-Pelagians after the middle of the 
fifth century, and by Gennadius, near the end of the fifth century. In every created 
object, according to Faustus, matter and form are united. All created things are limited, 
and have an existence in space, and are therefore material. Every created object has 
quality and quantity—for God is the only being exalted above and independent of the 
logical categories—and with quantity is necessarily combined a relation to space, or exten 

23 


854 LATIN FATHERS AFTER AUGUSTINE’S TIME. 


sion; and, finally, the soul, since it dwells in the body, is necessarily a substance, having. 
limits in space, and is, therefore, material. Claudianus Mamertus rejoins: It is true 
that all creatures, and, therefore, the soul among them, fall within the sphere of the 
categories; the soul is a substance, and has quality; but the soul is not, like material 
substances, subject to all the categories; in particular, quantity, in the usual spatial 
sense of that term, cannot be predicated of it; it has magnitude, but only in respect of 
virtue and intelligence. The motion of the soul takes place only in time, and not, like that 
of material objects, in time and space together. The world, in order to be complete, must 
contain all species of existences, the immaterial, therefore, as well as the material, of 
which the former resembles God by its non-quantitative and spaceless character, and is 
superior to material objects, while, by its creatureship and its being subject to the category 
of quality and to motion in time, it differs from the unqualitative and eternal God and 
resembles the material world. The soul'is not environed by, but itself environs, the body, 
which it holds together. Yet Claudianus also adopts the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian 
theory that the soul is present entirely in all parts of its body, just as God is present in all 
parts of the world. 

The work on the Artes Liberales, composed about 430 (between 400 and 439) by Mar- 
cianus Capella (who never confessed the Christian faith), and to which the marriage of 
Mercury with Philology forms the introduction, contains the oldest compendium of the 
doctrines then and afterward taught in the schools which has come down to us complete. 

Concerning Boéthius (470-526), cf. above, pp. 256 and 259. We still possess his transla- 
tions of the Analytica Priora and Posteriora, the Topica and the Soph. Elench. of Aristotle, 
as also his translation of the De Interpretatione, and his commentary on the same, also his 
translation of the Categories, with commentary, his commentary on Victorinus’ translation 
of the Jsagogue of Porphyry, his own translation of the Isagoge, which he likewise accom- 
panied with a commentary, and the works: Jntroductio ad Categoricos Syllogismos ; De Syl- 
logismo Categorico, De Syllogismo Hypothetico, De Divisione, De Definitione; De Differentiis 
Topicis. His commentary to the Jopics of Cicero is not preserved entire. The aim of Boé- 
thius in these works was purely didactic, his plan being simply to hand down in a form as 
readily intelligible as possible the investigations of earlier philosophers. His Consolatio, as 
also the De Unitate et Uno, etc., is founded on Neo-Platonic ideas. The work De Trinitate 
has been falsely ascribed to him. 

Cassiodorus (born about 468, died not before 562) proposes in all his works, not to 
effectuate an essential progress in philosophic thought, but simply to present a review and 
summary of the most important contents of the works which he has read (De Anima, 12). 
In his work De Anima he asserts that man alone has a substantial and immortal soul, but 
that the life of the irrational animals has its seat in their blood (De An., 1). The human 
soul is, in virtue of its rationality, not indeed a part of God—for it is not unchangeable, but 
can determine itself to evil—but capable, through virtue, of making itself like God; it 
is created to be an image of God (De An., 2 seq.). It is spiritual, for it is able to know 
spiritual things. Whatever is material is extended in three dimensions, in length, breadth, 
and thickness; it has fixed limits and is present in any determinate place with only one of 
its parts. The soul, on the contrary, is present in its entirety in each of its parts; it is 
everywhere present in its body and not limited by a spatial form (De An., 2: ubicwmque 
substantialiter inserta est; tota est in partibus suis, nec alibi major, alibi minor est, sed alicubt 
intensius, alicubi remissius, ubique tamen vitali intensione porrigitur; ib. 4: ubicumque est nec 
jormam recipit). Cassiodorus differs from Claudianus Mamertus by denying that even the 
category of quality, in its proper sense, applies to the soul (De An., 4). Cassiodorus recom- 
mends the liberal arts and sciences (the three Artes or Setextiae Sermocinales: grammar, 








CONCEPTION AND PERIODS OF SCHOLASTICISM. 355 


dialectic, rhetoric, and the four Disciplinae or Scientiae Reales : arithmetic, geometry, music, 
and astronomy) as being useful, inasmuch as they serve to facilitate the understanding of 
the Holy Scriptures and the knowledge of God, although it is possible without them to 
arrive at the knowledge of Christian truth (De Instit. Div. Litt., 28). His work De Artibus 
ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum was much used as a text-book in the centuries next 
following the time of their composition. Cassiodorus often refers in them to the more 
comprehensive compilations of Boéthius; his dialectic is mainly taken from Boéthius and 
Apuleius. 

Isidorus Hispalensis (died 636) furthered the encyclopedic studies by his Encyclopedia, 
and, in particular, following in the lead of Cassiodorus and Boéthius, he carried forward 
the logical tradition of the schools by devoting the second book of his Encyclopedia to 
rhetoric and dialectic, both which subjects he included under the name of logic. His three 
books of Sentences, containing dicta of the Church Fathers, and his works De Ordine Crea- 
turarum and De Rerum Natura were also used by later writers as sources of information. 

The Anglo-Saxon Beda (673-735) made up his Compendia chiefly by drawing upon the 
writings of Isidorus; these Compendia, again, as also Isidorus and the Pseudo- Augustinian 
treatise concerning the ten categories, were drawn upon by Albinus Alcuinus (736-804) 
in the composition of his works on grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. An excerpt from 
Cassiodorus on the seven liberal arts, much read in the Middle Ages, was formerly incor- 
rectly supposed to be the work of Alcuin. In this work these “arts” are called the seven 
pillars of wisdom, or the seven steps by which one may rise to perfect science (Oper., ed. 
Froben., II. p. 268). In the Cloister-Schools which were founded by Alcuin the septem 
artes ac disciplinae liberales, or at least some of them, were taught by the Doctores, dialectic 
being pursued with special enthusiasm. From the application of dialectic to theology arose 
‘‘Scholasticism;” but before this application was made there was a period in which dia- 
lectic was pursued merely as a part of the Trivium, and which consequently does not 
belong to the Scholastic Period. 


Srconp Prriop oF THE PuiLosopHy oF CurristTrAN TIMES. 
THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. 


§ 89. Scholasticism was philosophy in the service of established 
and accepted theological doctrines, or, at least, in such subordination 
to them, that, where philosophy and theology trod on common ground, 
the latter was received as the absolute norm and criterion of truth. 
More particularly, Scholasticism was the reproduction of ancient phi- 
losophy under the control of ecclesiastical doctrine, with an accom- 
modation, in cases of discrepancy between them, of the former to the 
latter. Its divisions are: 1) the commencement of Scholasticism or 
the accommodation of the Aristotelian logic and of Neo-Platonic phi- 


3856 CONCEPTION AND PERIODS OF SCHOLASTICISM. 


losophemes to the doctrine of the Church, from John Scotus Erigena 
to the Amalricans, or from the ninth till the beginning of the thir- 
teenth century; 2) the complete development and widest extension 
of Scholasticism or the combination of the Aristotelian philosophy, 
which had now become fully known, to the dogmas of the Church— 
from Alexander of Hales to the close of the Middle Ages, the revival 
of classical studies, the commencement of the investigation of nature 
and the division of the Church. During this time, philosophy among 
the Arabs and the Jews stood in a like relation to the respective 
religious doctrines of those nations. 


Of those who have written upon the Scholastic Philosophy, we name Lud. Vives (De Causis Corrup- 
tarum Artium,in his Works, Basel, 1555), Lambertus Daneus (in his Prolegom. in primum librum 
Sententiarum cum comm., Geneva, 1580), Ch. Binder (De Scholastica theologia, Tibingen, 1624), J. Lau- 
ΠΟΥ (De varia Aristotelis fortuna in acad. Parisiensi, Paris, 1658, and De scholis celebr. a Carolo M. et 
post ipsum instauratis, Paris, 1672), Ad. Tribechovius (De doctoribus scholasticis et corrwpta per e08 
divinarum humanarumque rerum scientia, Giessen, 1665; second edition, edited by Heumann, Jena, 
1719), C. Ὁ. Buleus (Hist. wniversit. Parisiensis, Paris, 1665-73), Jac. Thomasius (De doctoribus schol., 
Leips. 1676), Jac. Brucker (//ist. crit. philos., t. IIL, Leips. 1748, pp. 709-912), W. L. G. v. Eberstein (Die 
natirl. Theologie der Scholastiker, nebst Zusitzen iiber die Freiheitslehre und den Begriff der Wahrheit 
bei denselben, Leipsic, 1808), and Tiedemann, Buhle, Tennemann, Ritter, and others, in their general his- 
tories of philosophy ; of modern writers, compare especially: A. Jourdain (Recherches critiques sur "σα 
et Vorigine des traductions latines @ Aristote, Paris, 1819, 2d ed., Paris, 1848, German translation by Stahr, 
Halle, 1831), Rousselot (Ztudes sur la philosophie dans le moyen-dge, Paris, 1840-42), Barth. Hauréau (De 
la philosophie scolastique, 2 vols., Paris, 1850; Singulurités historiques et littéraires, Paris, 1861), Prantl 
(Gesch. der Logik im Abendlande, Vol. II., Leipsic, 1861, Vol. III., ibéd. 1867), W. Kaulich (Gesch. der 
scholast. Philosophie, 1. Theil: von Joh. Scotus FErigena bis Abdlard, Prague, 1858), and Alb. Stickl 
(Gesch. der Philos. des Mittelalters, Vols. 1.-111.. Mayence, 1864-66); also Erdmann in his Grundr. der 
Gesch. ἃ. Philos., Vol. 1., Berlin, 1865, pp. 245-466, and in his article on Der Entwicklungsgang der Scho- 
lastik, in the Zeitschr. fiir wiss. Th., Vol. VIIL, No. 2, Halle, 1865, pp. 118-171. Cf. also V. A. Huber, 
Die Englischen Universitdten, Vol. I. (The Middle Ages), Cassel, 1839; Charles Thurot, De Vorganisa- 
tion de Venseignement dans Vuniversité de Paris aw moyen-dge, Paris and Besangon, 1850; L. Figuier, 
Vies des Savants Ilustres du Moyen-Age avec lappréciation sommaire de leurs travaux, Paris, 1867; 
Herm. Doergus, Zur Lehre von den Universalien, Heidelberg, 1867, and de Cupély, Esprit de la philos. 
scol., Paris, 1868; R. D. Hampden, D.D., afterward Bishop of Hereford, The Scholastic Philosophy consid- 
ered in its relation to Christian Theology, Oxford, 1832; 8d edition, London, 1838; also, Life of Thomas 
Aquinas; a Dissertation of the Scholastic Philosophy of the Middle Ages, London, 1848. 


The name of Scholastics (doctores scholastic’) which was given to the teachers of the 
septem liderales artes (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, in the Trivium; arithmetic, geometry, 
music, and astronomy, in the Quadrivium), or at least of some of them, in the Cloister- 
Schools founded by Charlemagne, as also to teachers of theology, was afterward given to 
all who occupied themselves with the sciences, and especially with philosophy, following 
the tradition and example of the Schools. (The earliest known use of the term σχολαστικός 
as a word of technical import occurs in a letter from Theophrastus to his pupil Phanias, 
from which extracts are given in Diog. L., V. 50. The term was transmitted to the Middle 
Ages through the medium of Roman Antiquity.) 

At the beginning of the Scholastic Period philosophic thought had not yet been 
brought into a relation of complete vassalage to Church doctrine; Scotus Erigena, in par- 
ticular, affirmed rather the identity of true religion with true philosophy than the subordi- 
nation of the latter to the former. In fact, he deviated not unessentially from the teaching 








CONCEPTION AND PERIODS OF SCHOLASTICISM. 357 


of the Church, in seeking by a forced interpretation of the latter, in accordance with the 
principles of the (Dionysian and Neo-Platonic) philosophy, which he adopted, to bridge 
over the cleft between philosophy and dogma; and even in the period next succeeding, a 
certain conformity of thought with the doctrine of the Church was only gradually effected, 
and that after violent struggles. In the second division of the Scholastic period (from the 
middle of the thirteenth century on), the conformity of the reconstructed Aristotelian phi- 
losophy with the faith of the Church appears as firmly settled, yet limited, from the 
beginning, by the fact that the specifically Christian dogmas (the Trinity, incarnation, 
resurrection of the body, etc.) were excepted in this connection as undemonstrable by 
reason. The relation of vassalage, which the most eminent Scholastics ascribed to phi- 
losophy with reference to theology, is not to be understood as implying that all dogmas 
were to be philosophically demonstrated or justified, or that all philosophizing stood in 
direct relation to theology, and that there existed no interest in philosophical problems as 
such and on their own account. Such an interest, although in reference to a limited range 
of problems, did exist in great intensity. The vassalage of philosophy consisted in the 
fact that an impassable limit was fixed for the freedom of philosophizing in the dogmas of 
the Church, that the test of truth and falsehood in matters common to philosophy and 
theology was not sought in observation and in thought itself, but in the doctrines of the 
Church, and that accordingly the Aristotelian doctrine, partly in its theological portions 
(with reference to the doctrine of the eternity of the world), and partly in its psychology 
(relatively to the doctrine of the νοῦς as related to the inferior parts of the soul), was modi- | 
fied by the most eminent Scholastics, while those dogmas which were incapable of phi- 
losophical demonstration or confirmation were not allowed to be made at all the subjects 
of philosophical discussion. With its territory thus limited, philosophy was indeed allowed 
by theology a freedom which was rarely and only by exception infringed upon. The 
number of theological theses demonstrable by reason became gradually more and more 
limited, most so at the time of the renewed supremacy given to Nominalism by William 
of Occam. Thus, at last, in place of the Scholastic presupposition of the conformity to 
reason of the teachings of the Church, there arose an antagonism between the (Aristotelian) 
philosophy of the Schools and the Christian faith. This led (chiefly during the period of 
the transition to modern philosophy, see below, Vol. II., § 3 seq.) to various results. A por- 
tion of the philosophers (as, notably, Pomponatius and his followers) came secretly to favor 
a direction of thought hostile to the dogmatic Supra-naturalism of the Church. On the 
other hand, a portion of the believers (Mystics and Reformers) were led to take sides 
openly against the reason of the Schools and in favor of unconditional surrender to a reve- 
lation believed to be superior to all human thought, while still others, finally, were led to 
new essays in philosophy, founded partly on the renewal of older systems (in particular, 
the Neo-Platonic), and partly on independent investigation (Telesius, Bacon, and others). 


(sy) 
Or 
ωυ 


JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 


FIRST DIVISION. 
Tue ΒΕΘΙΝΝΙΝΟΒ or ScHOLASTICISM. 


§ 90. Johannes Scotus, or Erigena, is the earliest noteworthy phi- 
losopher of the Scholastic period. He was of Scottish nationality, 
but was probably born and brought up in Ireland. At the call of 
Charles the Bald he emigrated to France. In his philosophical specu- 
lations, which are set forth mainly in his work entitled De Divisione 
Naturae, he followed more particularly the lead of Dionysius the 
Areopagite, whose works he translated into Latin, as also of his com- 
mentator Maximus Confessor, and of Gregory of Nazianzen, Gregory 
of Nyssa, and other Greek teachers of the Church, and, after them, of 
' the Latin Doctors, especially of Augustine. True philosophy was, in 
his view, identical with true religion. Attempting to interpret the 
dogmas of the Church in the light of the supposed early-Christian, 
but in fact Neo-Platonizing conceptions of pseudo-Dionysius, he pro- 
duced a system containing at once the germs of medieval mysticism 
as well as of dialectical Scholasticism, but which was rejected by the 
authorities of the Church as in contradiction with the true faith. 
Erigena sought to render the Christian conception of creation intelli- 
gible by interpreting it in the sense of the Neo-Platonic doctrine of 
emanation. God, he taught, is the supreme unity, one and yet mani- 
fold; the process of evolution from him is the pluralization of the 
divine goodness [or original being] by means of the descent from the 
general to the particular, so that, first after the most general essence 
of all things, the genera having the highest generality are produced, 
then the less general, and so on, by the addition of specific differ- 
ences and properties down to the species, and finally, to individuals. 
This doctrine was founded upon the realization of an abstraction: the 
general, namely, was conceived as an essence existing realiter, in 
respect of order, before the particular; or, in other words, the Pla- 
tonic doctrine of ideas, in that conception of it which it was subse- 
quently customary to express by the formula: “wniversalia ante 
rem,” lay at the basis of the doctrine of John Scotus. Yet Scotus 
did not deny that the universal exists also in the particular. The 
going forth of finite beings from the Deity was called by Scotus the 
process of unfolding (analysis, resolutio), and, in addition to this, he 











JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 359 


taught the doctrine of the return of all things unto God or their deifi- 
cation (veversio, derficatio), or the congregation of the infinite plurality 
of individuals in the genera and finally in the simplest unity of all, 
which is God, so that then God should be all in all. John Scotus 
followed Dionysius the Areopagite also in distinguishing affirmative 
theology, which ascribes to God positive predicates with a symbolical 
meaning, from negative theology, in which the same predicates in 
their ordinary signification are denied of him. 


The work of John Scotus Erigena entitled De Divina Praedestinatione first appeared in print (after 
the printing of his translation of Dionysius, at Cologne, in 1556), in Gwilberti Mauguini vett. auctt. qui 
nono seculo de praedestinatione et gratia scripserunt opera et fragmenta, Paris, 1650, tom. I., p. 108 seq. 
The De Divisione Naturae, condemned to be burned by Pope Honorius III., February 23, 1225, was first 
published by Thomas Gale, Oxford, 1681, next by C. B. Schliiter, Minster, 1838, and finally, together with 
the translation of Dionysius, by H. J. Floss, Paris, 1553, as Vol. 122 of Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus 
Completus. Erigena’s Commentary to Marcianus Cupella, edited by Hauréau, Paris, 1861. Of John 
Scotus write, in particular, P. Hjort (Johann Scotus Erigena oder von dem Ursprung einer christlichen 
Philosophie und ihrem heiligen Beruf, Copenhagen, 1828), Heinrich Schmid (in Der DMysticismus 
des Mittelalters in seiner Entstehungsperiode, Jena, 1824, pp. 114-178), Fr. Ant. Staudenmaier (Jo- 
hannes Scotus Erigena, Vol. I., Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1834), Ad. Helfferich (Die christl. Mystik., Bd. 
II., Gotha, 1842, pp. 55-126), 8t. Réné Taillandier (Scot Hrigéne et la philosophie scolastique, Strasburg, 
1843), Nic. Moller (Joh. Scotus Erigena und seine Irrthiimer, Mayence, 1844), Theod. Christlieb (Leben 
und Lehre des Joh. Scotus Erigena, Gotha, 1860), Joh. Huber (Joh. Sc. Erig., ein Beitrag zur Geschichte 
der Philosophie und Theologie im Mittelaiter, Munich, 1861), A. Stéckl (De Joh. Sc. Er., Miinster, 1867), 
Oscar Hermens (Das Leben des Scotus Erigena, Inaug. Diss., Jena, 1868). Cf. Hauréau, Philos. scolastigue, 
I., pp. 111-180, Wilh. Kaulich, in AbdA. ἃ. δόλια. Ges. d. W., XI., 1861, pp. 147-198, and Gesch. ἃ. scholast. 
Philos., I. pp. 65-226; also the prefaces of the editors of the works of Jobn Scotus, and, on his logic, 
Prantl, Gesch. d. Log., 11., pp. 20-87. 


Johannes, who in the MSS. is called sometimes Scotus and sometimes Jerugena or 
Erigena, came probably from Ireland, which was then called Scotia Major, as the native 
land of the Scotch, who migrated thence into Scotland. Gale’s derivation of Erigena from 
Ergene, in the County of Hereford, as the place of his birth, is incorrect, and Mackenzie’s 
derivation of it from Aire, in Scotland, is improbable; the name points (as Thomas Moore, 
History of Ireland, I. ch. 13, has shown) to Hibernia (Iépv7). The year of the birth of 
John Scotus must fall between 800 and 810. He received his education probably in the 
schools which were then flourishing in Ireland. He understood Greek, though perhaps 
not so well as Latin. Of the writings of ancient philosophers, he was acquainted with the 
Timeus of Plato in the translation of Chalcidius, also with the De Jnterpretatione of Aris- 
totle, the Categ. (?), together with the Jsagoge of Porphyry and the Compendia of Boéthius, 
Cassiodorus, Marcianus Capella, Isidorus, and others who wrote after them, and with the 
Principia Dialectices and Decem Categ. ascribed to Augustine. Charles the Bald called him, 
about 843, soon after his accession to the throne, to the court-school (schola palatina) at 
Paris, at the head of which he remained for some time. Charles also commissioned him 
to translate the pretended writings of Dionysius Areopagita, which had been presented in 
824 to Louis the I. by the Emperor Michael Balbus. But the Pope, Nicolaus I., complained 
to the king that Scotus did not send his translation to him before its publication, that it 
might undergo his censorship, and he proposed to call him to defend himself against a 
charge of holding heretical opinions. It is uncertain whether John Scotus, upon this, was 
removed from his position as teacher in the Court-School; in any case, he retained the 
favor of the king and remained near him. According to some accounts he was called by 


360 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 


Alfred the Great ca. 882 to the University founded at Oxford and was afterward murdered 
by the monks while holding the office of Abbot at Malmesbury; but in these accounts he 
seems to have been confounded with another Johannes. According to Hauréau (Nouvelle 
Biographie Générale, tom. XVI.), John Scotus died in France about 877. 

The Church Wathers acknowledged the full authority of the Old, and, at an early date, 
also of the New Testament. But the allegorical method of interpretation which they em- 
ployed, and which in many cases led to very liberal constructions of Scripture, prevented 
their relation to that authority from being one of mere dependence, while, in relation to 
their predecessors, they all assumed, substantially, to possess equal authority with them, 
and did not hesitate to modify and rectify the teachings of the latter, in accordance with 
their own views. The Scholastics, on the contrary, and with them John Scotus—at least 
so far as his intention is concerned—treat the authority of the ‘‘ Fathers” with almost as 
much consideration as the words of Scripture itself. According to Scotus, all our inquiries 
must begin with faith in revealed truth (De Praedest., I.: salus nostra ex fide imchoat. 
De Divis. Nat., 11. 20 (ed. Schliter): Non enim alia fidelium animarum salus est, quam de uno 
omnium principio quae vere praedicantur credere et quae vere creduntur, intelligere). We may 
not—as we read, ἐδίά., 1. 66—advance concerning God our own inventions, but only that 
which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures or what may be inferred from its statements 
(ibid., 11. 15: ratiocinationis exordiuin ex divinis eloquiis assumendum esse existimo). But it is 
our business to discover by the aid of reason the sense of the divine utterances, which is 
manifold and, like a peacock’s feather, glows with many colors (#b., IV. 5), and in particular 
to reduce figurative expressions to their literal sense (7b., I. 66). In penetrating into the 
mysteries of revelation, we are to be guided by the writings of the Fathers of the Church. 
It is not befitting in us to pass judgment on the wisdom of the Fathers, but we must 
piously and with reverence accept their teachings; yet it is permitted us to choose out 
what appears in the judgment of the reason to be more in accordance with the divine 
oracles (7b., 11. 16), especially in cases where the ancient teachers of the Church are in 
contradiction with each other (id., IV. 16). 

Appealing to the authority of Augustine, John Scotus affirms the identity of true phi- 
losophy with true religion; he bases this assertion especially on the fact that community 
of cultus depends on community of doctrine (De Praedest., Prooem: non alia est philosophia, 
ὦ, €., saptentiae studium, et alia religio, quum hi, quorum doctrinam non approbamus, nec sac- 
ramenta nobiscum communicant. Quid est aliud de philosophia tractare nisi verae religionis 
regulas exponere? Conficitur inde veram esse philosophiam veram religionem conversimque 
veram religionem esse veram philosophiam). But he does not conceive-true religion alto- 
gether as simply identical with the doctrine sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority; on the 
contrary, in case of a collision between authority and reason, he would give the preference 
to reason (De Divis. Nat., I. p. 39; ib. I. 71: auctoritas ex vera ratione processit, ratio vera 
nequaquam ex auctoritate. Omnis auctoritas, quae vera ratione non approbatur, infirma esse 
videtur ; vera autem ratio, gquum virtutibus suis rata atque immutabilis munitur, nullius auc- 
toritatis adstipulatione roborari indiget. Yet he confesses [%b., II. 36]: nihil veris rationibus 
convenientius subjungitur, quam sanctorum patrum inconcussa probabilisque auctoritas). His 
opponents charged him with a want of respect for the authorities of the Church; they said 
he had argued (in his work against Gottschalk) too independently on the subject of pre- 
destination. 

The fundamental idea, and at the same time the fundamental error, in Erigena’s doc- 
trine is (as Hauréau, also, justly remarks, Philos. Schol., I. p. 130) the idea that the degrees 
of abstraction correspond with the degrees in the scale of real existence. He hypostasizes 
the Tabula Logica. 











JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 3861 


In the work entitled De Divisione Naturae, John Scotus sets out with the division of 
φύσις, or nature—in which conception he includes all that is either existent or non-exist- 
ent—into four species: 1) that which creates and is not created, 2) that which is created 
and creates, 3) that which is created and does not create, 4) that which neither creates nor 
is created (De Divis. Nat, 1.1: videtur mihi divisio naturae per quatuor differentias quatuor 
species recipere, quarum prima est quae creat et non creatur, secunda quae creatur et creat, 
tertia quae creatur et non creat, quarta quae nec creat nec creatur). The first is the cause of 
all that is existent or non-existent; the second includes the ideas which subsist in God as 
primordiales causae ; the third comprises all things that appear in space and time; and the 
fourth coincides with the first in so far as both refer to God, the first, namely, to God as © 
Creator, the fourth to God as the end of all things. 

By the non-existent Scotus means, not that which has absolutely no being (quod penitus 
non est), or mere privation, but (1), in the highest sense, that which is above the reach of 
our senses or our reason; (2) that which, in the scale of created being—which descends 
from the rational force (virtus intellectualis) through ratio and sensus down to the anima 
nutritiva et auctiva—is in each given case the higher, in so far as it as such is not known by 
the inferior, whereas it is to be denominated existent, in so far as it is known by those 
who are higher in the scale than itself, and by itself; (3) that which is as yet only poten- 
tially existent (like the human race in Adam, the plant in the seed); (4) in the language 
of philosophy, the material, since it comes and goes, and is not truly existent, like the 
intelligible ; (5) sin, as being the loss of the divine image (De Div. Nat., I. 2 seq.). 

The creating and uncreated being alone has essential subsistence. He alone truly is, 
He is the essence of all things (De Div. Nat., I. 3: ise namque omnium essentia est, qui 
solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Areopagita. Ib., 1. 14: solummodo ipsam [naturam creatricem 
omniumque causalem] essentialiter subsistere). God is the beginning and end of things (b., 
J. 12: est igttur principium, medium et finis: principium, quia ex se sunt omnia quae essen- 
tiam participant, medium autem quia in se tpso et per se ipsum subsistunt omnia, finis vero quia 
ad ipsum moventur, quietem motus sui suaeque perfectionts stabilitatem quaerentia). God’s | 
essence is incognizable for men and even for the angels. Nevertheless, his being can be 
seen in the being of things, his wisdom in their orderly classified arrangement, and his life 
in their constant motion; by his being is to be understood, here, the Father, by his wis- 
dom, the Son, and by his life, the Holy Ghost (ib., I. 14). God is therefore an essence 
(essentia) in three substances. ‘True, all these terms are not literally appropriate; Diony- 
sius says justly that the highest cause can be expressed by no name; these expressions are 
only symbolically pertinent. They belong to that affirmative theology which is called, 
among the Greeks, καταφατική; negative theology (ἀποφατικῆ) denies their applicability 
to God. Symbolically or metaphorically speaking, God can be called truth, goodness, 
essence, light, justice, sun, star, breath, water, lion, and numberless other things. But in 
reality he is exalted above all these predicates, since each of them has an opposite, while in 
him there is no opposition (De Div. Nat., I. 16: essentia ergo dicitur Deus, sed proprie essen- 
tia non est, cui opponitur nihil, ὑπερούσιος igitur est, id est superessentialis; item bonitas 
dicitur, sed proprie bonitas non est, bonitati enim malitia opponitur, ὑπεράγαθος igitur, plus 
quam bonus, et irepayabérne, id est plus quam bonitas). In like manner John Scotus applies to 
this “creative and uncreated nature” the predicates ὑπέρθεος͵ ὑπεραληθής and ὑπεραλήθεια, 
ὑπεραιώνιος and ὑπεραιωνία ὑπέρσοφος, and ὑπερσοφία (transcendently divine, true, eternal, 
wise), all of which sound indeed affirmative, but involve a negative sense. So, too, he 
represents this natura (in this following expressly the example of St. Augustine) as supe- 
rior to the ten categories, those most universal genera into which Aristotle had divided all 
created things (7., I. 16 seq.). 


862 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 


The uncreated but creating nature is the source of all created things. First of all, the 
created natures or beings, which are endowed at the same time with creative power, were 
produced. These include the totality of primordiales causae, prototypa, primordialia exem- 
pla, or ideas, ὁ. e., the eternal archetypes of things (De Divis. Nat., II. 2: species vel formae, 
tn quibus rerum omnium faciendarum priusquam essent immutabiles rationes conditae sunt). 

These Ideas, which are the first causes of individual existences, are contained in the 
divine Wisdom or the divine Word, the only-begotten Son of the Father. Under the 
influence of the Holy Ghost (or the fostering divine love) they unfold their effects, which 
are the created and not creating objects, or the external world (Jb., II. 19: spiritus enim 
sanctus causas primordiales, quas pater in principio, in filio videlicet suo, fecerat, ut in ea 
quorum causa sunt procederent, fovebat, hoc est divini amoris fotu nutriebat ; ad hoc namque ova 
ab alitibus, ex quibus haec metaphora assumta est, foventur, ut intima invisibilisque vis, quae in 
ets latet, per numeros locorum temporumque in formas visibiles corporalesque pulchritudines, 
igne aereque in humoribus seminum terrenaque materia operantibus, erumpat). The mate- 
riality of the world is (i., I. 36, where John Scotus appeals to the authority of Gregory 
of Nyssa, cf. § 85, p. 331) only apparent; it is due to the combination of accidents (acciden- 
tium quorundam concursus). By that ‘‘nothing,” out of which, according to the doctrine of 
the Church, the world was created, is to be understood God’s own incomprehensible 
essence (De Divis., Nat., 111. 19: ineffabilem et incomprehensibilem divinae naturae inaccessi- 
bilemque claritatem omnibus intellectibus sive humanis sive angelicis incognitam (superessentialis 
est enim et supernaturalis) eo nomine (nihil) significatam crediderim). Creation is an act of 
God, by which he passes through (processio) the primordiales causas or principia into the 
world of invisible and visible creatures (7b., III. 25). But this procession is an eternal act 
(., 111. 17 seq.: omnia quae semper vidit, semper fecit; non enim in eo praecedit visio opera- 
tionem, quoniam coaeterna est visiont operatio ;—videt enim operando et videndo operatur). The 
substance of all finite things is God (Non enim extra eam (divinam naturam) subsistunt; con- 
clusum est, ipsam solam esse vere ac proprie in omnibus et nihil vere ac proprie esse quod ipsa 
non sit. Proinde non duo a se ipsis distantia debemus intelligere Dominum et creaturam, sed 
unum, etid tpsum. Nam et creatuwra in Deo est subsistens, et Deus in creatura mirabili et 
ineffabili modo creatur, se ipsum manifestans, invisibilis vistbilem se faciens et incomprehensibilis 
comprehenstbilem et occultus opertum et incognitus cognitum et forma et specie carens formosum 
et speciosum et superessentialis essentialem et supernaturalis naturalem,—et omnia creans tn 
omnibus creatum et omnium factor factum in omnibus). Scotus says expressly that he 
affirms the doctrine of the descent of the Triune God into finite things, not only with refer- 
ence to the single instance of the incarnation, but with reference to all created things or 
existences. Our life is God’s life in us (ἐδ., I. 18: se ipsam sancta trinitas in nobis et in se 
ipsa amat, videt, movet). The knowledge which angels and men have of God is God’s reve- 
lation of himself in them (apparitio Dei), or theophany (θεοφάνεια, ib. I. 7 seq.). 

The nature which neither creates nor is created is not a fourth nature, distinct from 
the three first, but is in reality identical with the creating, uncreated nature; it is God, 
viewed as the term in which all things end, to which all finally return. After this return 
they repose eternally in God; the process of development or “creation” is not repeated (De 
Divis. Nat., 11. 2: prima namque et quarta unum sunt, quoniam de Deo solummodo intelli- 
guntur ; est enim principium omnium quae a se condita sunt, et fints omnium quae eum appetunt, 
ut in eo aeternaliter immutabiliterque quiescant. Causa siquidem omnium propterea dicitur 
creare, quoniam ab ea universitas eorum, quae post eam ab ea creata swat, in genera et species et 
numeros, differentias quoque ceteraque quae in natura condita considerantur, mirabili quadam | 
divinaque multiplicatione procedit; quoniam vero ad eandem causam omnia quae ab ea proce- 
dunt dum ad finem pervenient reversura sunt, propterea finis omnium dicitur et neque creare 








JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA. 863 


neque ereari perhibetur; nam postquam in eam reversa sunt omnia, nihil ulterius ab ea per 
generationem loco et tempore generibus et formis procedet, quoniam in ea omnia quieta erunt et 
unum individuum atque immutabile manebunt. Nam quae in processionibus naturarum multi- 
pliciter divisa atque partita esse videntur, in primordialibus causis unita atque wnum sunt, ad 
quam unitatem reversura in ea aeternaliter atque immutabiliter manebunt. Ib., Τ11. 23: jam 
desinit creare, omnibus in suas aeternas rationes, in quibus aeterniter manebunt et manent con- 
versis, appellatione quoque creaturae significari desistentibus ; Deus enim omnia in omnibus erit 
et omnis creatura obumbrabitur in Deum, videlicet conversa sicut astra sole oriente). 

Since the Deity is viewed by John Scotus as the substance of all things, it is impossible 
for him, with the Aristotelians (whom he terms Dialecticians), to regard individual, con- 
crete things as substances, of which the general may be predicated, and in which the acci- 
dental is contained; he views all things, rather, as contained in the divine substance, the 
special and individual as immanent in the general, and the latter, again, as existing in 
things individual as in its natural parts (De Divis. Nat., I. 27 seq.). Yet neither is this 
view identical with the original Platonic doctrine; it is a result of a transference of the 
Aristotelian conception of substance to the Piatonic idea, and of an identification of the 
relation of accidents (συμβεβηκότα) to the substances in which they inhere, with that of the 
individuals to the ideas, of which, in the Platonic doctrine, they are copies. 

That this doctrine is taken wholly from Dionysius the Areopagite and his commentator 
Maximus, is expressly affirmed by John Scotus, especially in the dedication of his transla- 
tion of the Scholia of Maximus to Gregory of Nazianzen; the Platonic and Neo-Platonic 
basis is also manifest throughout it. The attempt to combine it with the doctrine of the 
Church in one harmonious whole could not be carried through without logical inconsis- 
tency. If God is the ὄν, the real essence, that is cognized through the most universal 
conception of being, then it follows, on the one hand, that the conception which represents 
him as a personal being, is and can only be the result of the imagination, not of thought. 
and, on the other, that plurality, or, in particular, trinity, cannot be predicated of God him- 
self, but only of his development or outcome; so Plotinus represents the νοῦς with the 
ideas as occupying the second place in the ontological order and as coming after the abso- 
lutely simple original essence (the world-soul forming the third form of Deity). But the 
Logos-doctrine, in the form given it by Athanasius, required Scotus to treat the Logos (as 
also the Holy Ghost) as a part of the original essence (7. e., of God), placing only the ideas, 
which are in the Logos, in the second class (as in the third was placed the world, made 
with the co-operation of the Holy Ghost).—The return of all things into God, which, in 
agreement with his fundamental conception, was taught by Scotus, was not in harmony 
with the doctrinal system of the Church. 

In addition to Platonic and Neo-Platonic, there are traces also of Aristotelian influences 
in the works of John Scotus, although he was only indirectly acquainted with any of the 
metaphysical teachings of Aristotle. The three first of his four ‘divisions of nature” are a 
partly Neo-Platonic, partly Christian, modification of the three-fold ontological division of 
Aristotle (Metaph., XII. 1): the unmoved and moving, the moved and moving, and the 
moved and not moving, with which Scotus may have become acquainted from a passage in 
Augustine (De Civ. Dei, V.9: causa igitur rerum quae facit nec fit, Deus est; aliae vero causae 
et faciunt et fiunt, sicut sunt omnes creati spiritus, maxime rationales ; corporales autem causae, 
quae magis fiunt quam faciunt, non sunt inter causas effictentes annumerandae). The Dionysian 
doctrine of the return of all things into God furnished then the fourth form. 

In the doctrine of John Scotus universals are before and also in the individual objects | 
which exist, or rather the latter are in the former; the distinction between these (Realistic) 
formulz appears not yet developed in his writings. But his system could scarcely lead 


364 JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA, 


later thinkers to Nominalism, unless by the unremoyed contradictions which it contained, 
and which might lead to the denial of the postulate of the substantial existence of univer- 
sals and to the conception of the latter as merely subjective forms; viewed in its positive 
aspects, the system contains no germs of Nominalism, The following notice, taken from 
an old Historia a Roberto rege ad mortem Philippi primi, was first published by Buleus, in his 
Historia Univers. Paris., 1. p.443: in dialectica hi potentes exstiterunt sophistae: Johannes, qui 
eandem artem sophisticam vocalem esse disseruit, Robertus Parisiacensis, Rocelinus Compendien- 
sis, Arnulphus Laudunensis, hi Joannts fuerunt sectatores, qui etiam quamplures habuerunt audi- 
dores (cf. Hauréau, Philos. Scol., I. pp. 174 seq., and Prantl, Gesch. der Log., II. pp. 76 seq.). 
The Johannes to whom reference is here made is surely not John Scotus (as Hauréau and 
Prantl assume), but a later dialectician, otherwise unknown to us. Erigena is throughout a 
realist. He teaches, it is true, that grammar and rhetoric, as branches of dialectic, or aids 
to it, relate only to words (voces), not to things, and that they are therefore not properly 
sciences (De Divis. Nat., V. 4: matri artium, quae est dialectica, semper adhaerent ; sunt enim 
velutt quaedam ipsius brachia rivulive ex ea manantes vel certe instrumenta, quibus suas intelli- 
gibiles inventiones humanis usibus manifestat) ; but he co-ordinates dialectic itself or λογική, 
rationalis sophia (De Div. Nat., 111. 30) with ethics, physics, and theology, defining it as the 
doctrine of the methodical form of knowledge (quae ostendit quibus regulis de wnaquaque 
trium aliarum partium disputandum), and assigning to it, in particular, as its work, the dis- 
cussion of the most general conceptions or logical categories (predicaments), which cate- 
gories he by no means regards as merely subjective forms or images, but as the names of 
the highest genera of all created things (De Divis. Nat., 1. 16: Aristoteles, acutissimus apud 
Graecos, ut ajunt, naturalium rerum discretionis repertor, omnium rerum, quae post Deum sunt 
et ab eo creatae, innumerabiles varietates in decem universalibus generibus conclusit ;—illa pars 
philosophiae, quae dicitur dialectica, circa horum generwm divisiones a generalissimis ad spe- 
cialissima iterumque collectione a specialissimis ad generalissima versatur. Ib., 1. 29: dialec- 
tica est communium animi conceptionum rationabilium diligens investigatriaque disciplina. Jb., 
1. 46: dialecticae proprietas est rerum omnium, quae intelligi possunt, naturas dividere, con- 
jungere, discernere, propriosque locos unicuique distribuere, atque ideo a sapientibus vera rerum 
contemplatio solet appellari. Ib., ΤΥ. 4: intelligitur, quod ars tila, quae dividit genera in 
species et species in genera resolvit, quae διαλεκτική dicitur, non ab humanis machinationibus sit 
facta, sed tn natura rerum ab auctore omnium artium, quae vere artes sunt, condita et a sapien- 
tibus inventa et ad utilitatem solerti rerum indagine usitata. Ib. V.4: ars illa, quae a Graecis 
dicitur dialectica et definitur bene disputandé scientia, primo omniwm circa οὐσίαν veluti circa 
proprium suum principium versatur, ex qua omnis divisio et multiplicatio eorwm, de quibus ars 
ipsa disputat, inchoat, per genera generalissima mediaque genera usque ad formas et species spe- 
cialissimas descendens, et iterum complicationis regulis per eosdem gradus, per quos degreditur, 
donec ad ipsam οὐσίαν, ex qua egressa est, perveniat, non desinit redire in eam, qua semper 
appetit quiscere et circa eam vel solum vel maxime intelligibili motu convolvi). 

The most noteworthy features in John’s theory of the categories (in the first book) are 
his doctrine of the combination of the categories with each other, and his attempt to sub- 
sume them under the conceptions of motion and rest, as also his identification of the cate- 
gory of place with definition in logic, which, he says, is the work of the understanding. 
The dialectical precepts which relate to the form or method of philosophizing are not 
discussed by him in detail; the most essential thing, in his regard, is the use of the four 
forms, called by the Greeks division, definition, demonstration, and analysis (dcacperixy, 
ὁριστική, ἀποδεικτική, ἀναλυτικῆ). Under the latter he understands the reduction of the 
derivative and composite to the simple, universal, and fundamental (De Praed., Prooem.), 
but uses the term also in the opposite sense, to denote the unfolding of God in creation 








BEGINNINGS OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM. 365 


(Praef. ad amb. S. Maz. : divina in omnia processio ἀναλυτική dicitur, reversio vero θέωσις, 
1. 6., derficatio). 

In the controversy respecting predestination, John Scotus took sides against Gotts- 
chalk’s doctrine of two kinds of fore-ordination, of fore-ordination to salvation and of 
fore-ordination to damnation, announcing his belief in the former only. In the disputes 
concerning the Eucharist, he gave prominence to the idea that the presence of Christ in 
that sacrament is of a spiritual nature. But of these specifically theological points it is 
unnecessary here to treat. 


§ 91. The doctrine combated by John Scotus and held by those 
whom he called the dialecticians, who derived it in part from writ- 
ings of Aristotle and Boéthius, as also the doctrine of Augustine 
and Pseudo-Augustine,—according to which individual objects were 
substances in the fullest sense, while species and genera were such 
only in a secondary sense, and generic and specific characteristics 
were predicable of individual substances, in which latter the unes- 
sential marks or accidents also inhered—found among the Scholastics 
during and after the time of John Scotus, numerous supporters, some 
of whom advanced it expressly in opposition to his Neo-Platonic theory, 
while others admitted rather the true substantiality of the universal. 
Among a portion of these “dialecticians” a doubt arose whether, 
since the general can be predicated of the individual, the genus was 
to be regarded as anything positive (real)—for it seemed impossible 
that one thing should be affirmed as a predicate of another thing; 
this doubt led to the assertion that genera were to be viewed as mere 
words (voces). The development of these doctrines was connected, in 
particular, with the study of Porphyry’s Introduction to the logical writ- 
ings of Aristotle, in which Introduction the conceptions: genus, differ- 
entia, species, proprium, and accidens, are treated of ; the question was 
raised, whether by these were to be understood five realities or only 
five words (quinque voces). A passage in this same Introduction 
touched upon the questions: (1) whether genera and species (or the 
so-called universals) have a substantial existence or whether they exist 
solely in our thoughts; (2) whether, supposing them to exist substan- 
tially, they are material or immaterial essences; and (3) whether they 
exist apart from the objects perceptible by the senses or only in 
and with them. Porphyry declined to enter upon a special dis- 
cussion of these questions (which he found suggested in the meta- 
physical writings of Aristotle—that were unknown in the earlier part 
of the Middle Ages—in the Platonic or Pseudo-Platonic dialogue 
Parmenides, and in the teachings of his own master, Plotinus), on the 


366 BEGINNINGS OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM. 


ground that they were too difficult to be considered in an introductory 
work ; but even those few words were sufficient so to express the main 
problem itself, and to indicate the possible ways of attempting its 
solution, as to furnish a point of departure for medieval Realism and 
Nominalism, and that all the more, since the dialectical treatment of 
the fundamental dogmas of the Church could not but lead to the dis. 
cussion of the same problem. The doctrine (of Plato, or at least the 
doctrine ascribed to him by Aristotle), that universals have an inde- 
pendent existence apart from individual objects, and that they exist 
before the latter (whether merely in point of rank and in respect of the 
causal relation, or in point of time also), is extreme Realism, which was 
afterward reduced to the formula: uneversalia ante rem. The (Aris- 
totelian) opinion, that universals, while possessing indeed a real exist- 
ence, exist only ἐπὶ individual objects, is the doctrine of Moderate 
Realism, expressed by the formula: wniversalia in re. Nominalism 
is the doctrine that only individuals have real existence, and that 
genera and species are merely subjective combinations of similar ele- 
ments, united by the aid of one and the same concept (conceptus), 
through which concept we think the manifold homogeneous ob- 
jects which it includes, and under one and the same word (nomen 
vox), which word, for want of a sufficient number of simple proper 
names, we employ to express at once the totality of homogeneous 
objects included under the concept. Of Nominalism there are two 
varieties, according as stress is laid on the subjective nature of the 
concept (conceptualism), or on the identity of the word employed to 
denote the objects comprehended under the concept (Extreme Nom- 
inalism, or Nominalism in the narrower sense of the term). The 
formula of Nominalism is: wneversalia post rem. All these leading 
types of doctrine appear, either in embryo or with a certain degree 
of development, in the ninth and tenth centuries; but the more 
complete expansion and the dialectical demonstration of them, as 
well as the sharpest contests of their several supporters, and also 
the development of the various possible modifications and combina- 
tions of them, belong to the period next succeeding. 


Of Realism and Nominalism in the Middle Ages treat, among others, Jac. Thomasius (Oratio de secta 
nominalium, in his Orationes, Leipsic, 1683-36), Ch. Meiners (De nominalium ae realium initiis, in: 
Comm soe Gott. XII1., class, hist.), L. F. O. Baumgarten-Crusius (Progr. de vero scholusticorum realium 
et nominalium discrimine et sententia theologica, Jen., 1821), F. Exner (Ueber Nominalismus und Real- 
ismus, Prague, 1842), H. O. Kohler (Realismus und Nominalismus in ihrem Hinfluss auf die dogmat. 
Systeme des Mittelalters, Gotha, 1858); C. 8. Barach, Zur Gesch. des Nominalismus vor Roscellin, nach 
handschr. Quellen der Wiener kais. Hofbibliothek., Vienna, 1866 (on the marginal comments in a MS. of 
the Pseudo-Augustinian Categories). Cf. the works above cited on the philosophy of the Scholastics. 


nT Ee Te ee 


γος, oes’ 
— 


= 


τ ὦ τ ee 


ee ee ee 





BEGINNINGS OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM. 867 


Following after Jourdain (Mecherches critiques, etc., and other writings) Cousin, Hauréau, 
and Prantl, in particular, have demonstrated that, until nearly the middle of the twelfth 
century, the only logical writings of the ancients known in the Middle Ages were the fol- 
lowing: Aristotle's Categ, and De IJnterpr., in the translation of Boéthius, Porphyry’s 
Isagoge, in the translations of Boethius and Victorinus, the works of Marcianus Capella 
Augustine, Pseudo-Augustine, and Cassiodorus, and the following works of Boéthius: 
Ad Porphyr. a Victorino translatum, ad Arist. de interpret., ad Cic. Top., Introd. ad categoric. 
syll., De syllog. categorico, De syll. hypothetico, De divisione, De definitione, De differ. top. Both 
the Analytica, the Topica, and the Soph. Elench. of Aristotle were unknown. Of all the 
works of Plato it is probable that only a portion of the Timaeus, and that in the transla- 
tion of Chalcidius, was possessed by medizeval scholars; with this exception his doctrines 
were known to them only indirectly, particularly through passages in Augustine. They 
possessed also the work of Apuleius, entitled De Dogmate Platonis. The Analyt. and Top. 
of Aristotle became gradually known after the year 1128, and his metaphysical and physical 
writings from about the year 1200. 

The passage in the Jsagoge of Porphyry, which was the historical occasion of the 
development of the various dialectical tendencies above named, reads as follows, in the 
translation of Boéthius, in which it was known in the Middle Ages: Quum sit necessarium, 
Chrysaori, et ad eam quae est apud Artstotelem praedicamentorum doctrinam, nosse quid sit 
genus, quid differentia, quid species, quid proprium et quid accidens, et ad definitionwm assigna- 
tionem, et omnino ad ea quae in divisione et in demonstratione sunt, utili istarum rerum 
speculatione, compendiosam tibi traditionem faciens, tentabo breviter velut introductionis modo, 
ea quae ab antiquis dicta sunt aggredi, ab altioribus quidem quaestionibus abstinens, simpliciores 
vero mediocriter conjectans. Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in 
solis nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum 
separata a sensilibus an in sensilibus posita et circa haec consistentia, dicere recusabo; altissi- 
mum enim negotium est hujusmodi et majoris egens inquisitionis. Victor Cousin (in Ouvrages 
inédits d Abélard, Paris, 1836, p. LV1.), following the lead of Tennemann and others, has 
called especial attention to this passage as being the point of departure for the contest 
between Realism and Nominalism in the Middle Ages. 

In distinction from the Neo-Platonism of Joh. Scotus, the school of Hrabanus Maurus, 
who died in 856, while Archbishop of Mayence (works edited by Colvener, Cologne, 1627), 
held fast to the stand-point of Aristotle and Boéthius. Cf., respecting Hrabanus, Schwarz, 
and Prantl (above, § 88), and F. Kunstmann (Mayence, 1841). 

Eric (Heiricus) of Auxerre, who studied at Fulda, at the school founded by Alcuin’s 
pupil, Hrabanus, under the direction of Haimon (likewise a pupil of Alcuin), and, after 
further training at Ferriéres, opened a school at Auxerre, wrote, among other things, on the 
margin of his copy of the Pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae, glosses, which were discovered 
and have been published by Cousin and Hauréau. The style is clear and facile; the differ- 
ence of logical stand-points is as yet but slightly marked. Heiricus says (as cited by 
Hauréau, Phil. Scol., p. 142) with Aristotle and Boéthius: rem concipit intellectus, intellec- 
tum voces designant, voces autem litterae significant, and affirms (after Aristotle, De Interpr., 
1) that res and ‘intellectus are natural, and that voces and litterae are conventional (secundum 
positionem hominum). He does not, however, view the universal, as it exists in our con- 
ceptions, as corresponding with a real or objective universality in things, but expresses 
himself rather after the manner of Nominalism (ap. Hauréau, Phil. Scol., p. 141): sctendum 
aulem, quia propria nomina primum sunt innumerabilia, ad quae cognoscenda intellectus nullus 
seu memoria sufficit, haec ergo omnia coartata species comprehendit et facit primum gradum, 
qui latissimus est, scilicet hominem. equum, leonem et species hujusmodi omnes continet; sed 


368 BEGINNINGS OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM, 


quia haec rursus erant innumerabilia et incomprehensibilia, alter factus est gradus angustior 
jam, qui constat in genere, quod est animal, surculus et lapis; iterum haec genera, in unum 
coacta nomen, tertium fecerunt gradum arctissimum jam et angustissimum, utpote qui uno 
nomine solummodo constet, quod est usia. Concepts of qualities do not denote things (Heiri- 
cus ap. Hauréau, Ph. Se., p. 139: δὲ quis dixerit album et nigrum absolute sine propria et 
certa substantia, in qua continetur, per hoc non poterit certam rem ostendere, nisi dicat albus 
homo vel equus aut niger). In the same Codex are also contained, together with marginal 
notes upon them, Boéthius’ translation of Aristotle’s De Interpr., Augustine’s Dialectica, 
and the translation of the Jsagoge of Porphyry by Boéthius. In the glosses to the latter 
work, the questions of Porphyry are answered in accordance with the doctrine of moderate 
(Aristotelian) Realism, which appears as the doctrine generally prevalent in the period in 
which Eric lived. The true being or subsistence (vere esse or vere subsistere) of genera and 
species is defended (ap. Cousin, Ouwur. Inéd. αἱ Abélard, p. LXXXII.); these are in themselves 
immaterial, but subsist in things material; the latter, as being individual, are the objects 
of sense-perception, while the universal, conceived as existing by itself, is the subject of 
thought. The genus is (conceptualistically) defined as cogitatio collecta ex singularum simili- 
tudine specierum. ‘These glosses are, including the statement with reference to Plato (sed 
Plato genera et species non modo intelligit universalia, verwm etiam. esse atque praeter corpora 
subsistere putai), almost without exception extracts from Boéth. in Porphyr. a se translatum, 
in particular from the passage cited by Hauréau, Ph. Sc., I. p. 95 seq. 

Heiricus’ pupil, Remigius of Auxerre, taught, beginning in 882, grammar, music, and dia- 
lectic at Rheims and, later, at Paris, where he had among his pupils Otto of Clugny. His 
Commentary on Marcianus Capella (taken in large measure from the Commentary of John 
Scotus on the same author—see extracts in Hauréau’s Ph. Scol., I. p. 144 seq., and Notices 
et Hxtraits de Manuscrits, t. XX. p. II.) betokens a more realistic tendency, containing, as 
it does, the Platonic doctrine that the specific and individual exist by participation in the 
universal, yet without quitting the Boéthian and Aristotelian stand-point of immanence. 
Remigius defines the genus as the collection of many species (genus est complexio, id est 
collectio et comprehensio multarum formarum 7%. 6. specierum). That this is to be understood 
as describing, not a mere subjective act, but an objective unity, is seen from the definition 
of forma or species as a substantial part of the genus (partitio substantialis) or as the sub- 
stantial unity of the individuals included in the species (homo est multorum hominum substan- 
tialis unitas). Remigius discusses the question (oft treated by his predecessors), how the 
accidents exist before their union with the individuals to which they belong, in what man- 
ner, for example, rhetorical culture exists before its union with Cicero. His decision is, 
that accidents, previous to their manifestation, are already contained potentially in the 
individuals of the species, that, e. g., rhetorical culture is contained in human nature in 
general, but that in consequence of Adam’s sin it disappeared in the depths of ignorance, 
continued in memoria, and is now called into consciousness (in praesentiam intelligentiae) by 
the process of learning (Remig., ap. Hauréau, Notices et Extraits de Manuscr., XX., II. 
p. 20). 

Of the dialectical writings belonging to the ninth century, a manuscript should here be 
mentioned, which was discovered and published by Cousin (in Ouvrages Inédits αἱ Abélard, 
Paris, 1836) and is entitled Super Porphyrium. Cousin and Hauréau, on the ground of 
manuscript tradition, assign its authorship to Rhabanus Maurus, but it is more probably 
to be ascribed (in agreement with Prantl’s opinion, which Kaulich also adopts) to one of 
his (direct or indirect) disciples. In this work logie is divided (not as by Rhabanus him- 
self—De Universo, XV.1, ed. Colvener, Cologne, 1627—into dialectic and rhetoric, but) 
into grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. The intention of Porphyry in his Jsagoge is de- 








BEGINNINGS OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM. 369 


scribed here as follows (ap. Cousin, tb., p. 613): intentio Porphyrii est in hoc opere facilem 
intellectum ad praedicamenta praeparare tractando de quinque rebus vel vocibus, genere scilicet, 
specie, differentia, proprio et accidente, quorum cognitio valet ad praedicamentorum cognitionem. 
The author discusses the view of some who argued that Porphyry intended to treat in his 
Isagoge, not de quinque rebus, but de quinque vocibus, on the ground, as our author relates, that 
otherwise his definition of the genus would be inapt (genus est quod praedicatur); for a thing 
cannot be a predicate (Res enim non praedicatur. Quod hoc modo probant: si res praedicatur, 
res dicitur; si res dicitur, res enunciatur ; si res enunciatur, res profertur ; sed res proferri non 
potest, nihil enim profertur nisi vox, neque enim aliud est prolatio, quam aéris plectro linguae 
percussio). Another proof, we are told, was founded by the same party on the fact that 
Aristotle, in the work on the Categories, to which Porphyry was preparing an introduction, 
intended mainly to treat de vocibus (in the language of Boéthius: de primis rerum nominibus 
et de vocibus res significantibus), and the introduction must, of course, correspond in character 
with the work to which it belongs. It is not, however, for this reason denied, that the 
word genus may be taken realistically, for Boéthius says that the division of the genus 
must be conformable to nature. The genus is defined as substantialis similitudo ex diversis 
speciebus in cogitatione collecta. In the statement of Boéthius: alio namque modo (sub- 
stantia) wniversalis est quum cogitatur, alio singularis quum sentitur, the following meaning is 
found by the author: quod eadem res individuwm et species et genus est, et non esse universalia 
individuis quasi quiddam diversum, ut quidam dicunt; scilicet speciem nihil aliud esse quam 
genus informatum et individuum nihil aliud esse quam speciem informatam. This work shows 
how, at the time now under consideration, the germs of the different doctrines were all 
existing side by side in relative harmony, being as yet undeveloped. 

The pursuit of dialectic, as of all the artes liberales, in the schools, continued during the 
tenth and eleventh centuries, but was almost entirely unproductive of new scientific re- 
sults, till near the end of the latter century. At Fulda, about the middle of the tenth 
century, Poppo taught dialectic, mainly on the basis of the works of Boéthius, following in 
this not only the tradition of his convent but also the universal custom of his times. He 
is said also to have written a commentary on the De Consolatione of Boéthius. Reinhard 
wrote, in the cloister of St. Burchard at Wurzburg, a commentary on the Categories of 
Aristotle. A considerable scholastic activity, first excited, as it would appear, by the 
school founded by Hrabanus at Fulda, was developed in the cloister of St. Gallen. Notker 
Labeo (died 1022) contributed much to its maintenance and development. He translated 
into German the Categ. and De Interpr. of Aristotle, the Consol. Philos. of Boéthius, and 
the De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Marcianus Capella (as also the Psalms), and com- 
posed works on the divisions of the art of thinking, on syllogisms, on rhetoric and music 
(published by Graff, Berlin, 1837, and again, more completely and exactly, by Heinr. Hat- 
temer, in Denkmale des Mitielalters, 3d vol., St. Gallen, 1844-49). 

Gerbert, who was subsequently made Pope, under the title of Sylvester II. (died 1003), 
was educated in the cloister at Aurillac in Auvergne, which had been brought under more 
rigid discipline by Otto of Clugny, the scholar of Remigius, and afterward in other schools 
of France and also in Spain among the Arabs (from whom also he took the Indian nume- 
rals). ΟἿ, concerning him, C. F. Hock, Vienna, 1837; Max Biidinger, Cassel, 1851; G. 
Friedlein, Erlangen, 1861, and M. Cantor, Mathematische Beitrige zum Culturleben der 
Volker, Halle, 1863, of which section XIII. treats of Boéthius, XIX. of Isidorus, Beda, and 
Alcuin, XX. of Otto of Clugny, and XXI. and XXII. of the life and mathematical labors 
of Gerbert. Of the works of Gerbert, one treats of the Lord's Supper, and the other of 
the rational and of the use of the reason (De Rattonali et Ratione Uti, printed in Pez’s Thes. 
Anecd., I. 2, pp. 146 seq., and in the Oeuvres de Gerbert, edited by A. Olleris, Clermont- 

24 


370 BEGINNINGS OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM. 


Ferrand and Paris, 1867, pp. 297-310). Besides these, Cousin (Ouvrages Inéd. d Abélard, 
pp. 644 seq.) has published some mathematical matter from the pen of Gerbert. The 
Rational may be either eternal and divine (in which division Gerbert includes the Platonic 
ideas), or it may be something living in time. In the former the rational power is always 
active, in the latter only at times; in the former potentiality is inseparable from actuality, 
it is sub necessaria specie actus, while to the essence of the latter only the rational capa- 
city necessarily belongs, while the real manifestation of reason is here only an accidens, 
not a substantialis differentia. Hence the proposition: rationale ratione utitur, is true of 
rational beings of the first class, as a universal proposition, but of those of the second, 
only as a particular one; Gerbert holds that a logical judgment, expressed without speci- 
fication of quantity, can be taken as a particular judgment. Thus Gerbert solves the 
difficulty which at the beginning he had pointed out in the proposition: rationale ratione 
utitur, that, namely, it appeared to contradict the logical rule according to which the pre- 
dicate must be more general than the subject. He not unsuitably introduces in his discus- 
sion of this problem the distinction between the higher concept in the logical sense, 7. e., 
the concept of wider extension, and the concept the object of which stands higher in rank 
in the order of existence. 

Among the pupils of Gerbert was Fulbert, who in the year 990 opened a school at 
Chartres, and was Bishop there 1007-1029. Devoted pupils called him their Socrates. 
Distinguished for his knowledge of sacred and secular topics, he accompanied his in- 
structions with a pressing exhortation to his scholars not to give heed to deceitful 
innovations and not to deviate from the paths of the holy fathers. The danger that dia- 
lectic would be raised to a position in which it would surpass in authority the Bible and 
the Church, was already beginning to be felt, for which reason the demand was expressly 
formulated on the part of the Church that it should be made to retain its ancillary position. 
Petrus Damiani (cf., respecting him, Vogel, Jena, 1856), the apologist of the monastic life and 
of monastic asceticism, says, about 1050 (Opera, ed. Cajetan., Paris, 1743, III. p. 312): quae 
tamen artis hwinanae peritia si quando tractandis sacris eloquits adhibetur, non debet jus magis- 
tertt sibimet arroganter arripere, sed velut ancilla dominae quodam famulatus obsequio subser- 
vire, ne si praccedit, oberret. In a similar strain the monk Othlo (who died at Regensburg 
about 1083) complains, about the same time, in his work De Tribus Quaest. (cited by Pez, 
Thes. Anecd., 111. 2, p. 144), of the existence of dialecticians, who were so exclusively 
dialecticians that they imagined themselves bound to limit even the statements of Holy 
Scripture in obedience to the authority of dialectic, and gave more credence to Boéthius 
than to the sacred penman. The definition of person as substantia rationalis offered already 
an opportunity for collision with the Church in regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, and 
the strife was soon afterward to break out on this point (with Roscellinus). 

A scholar of Fulbert was Berengarius of Tours (999-1088), whose dialectical zeal was 
greater than his respect for ecclesiastical authority. The rationalizing position assumed by 
him with respect to the question of the Lord’s Supper was the occasion of a conflict be- 
tween him and the orthodox dialectician Lanfranc (born at Pavia about 1005, first educated 
in the law at Bologna, afterward a monk and Scholastic in the conyent at Bec in Nor- 
mandy, and from 1070 on, Archbishop of Canterbury; died 1089; Opp. ed. d’Achéry, Paris, 
1648 ; ed. Giles, Oxford, 1854), who, in the opinion of their contemporaries and according to 
the judgment of the Church, defeated Berengarius in argument. The doctrine defended by 
Berengarius in his work De Sacra Coena adv. Lanfrancum (ed. A. F. and F. Th. Vischer, 
Berlin, 1844), is thus summed up by Hugo, Bishop of Langres: “ You say that in the sacra- 
ment [of the Eucharist] the presence of the body of Christ involves no change in the 
nature and essence of the bread and wine, and you regard that body, which you had said 





5. ἐν 


! 


ROSCELLINUS AND WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX. 371 


was crucified, as an intellectual body ” (dicis in hujusmodi sacramento corpus Christi sic esse, 
ut panis et vini natura et essentia non mutetur, corpusque quod dixeras crucifixum, intellectuale 
constituis). Berengarius disputes the theory of a change of substance without a corre- 
sponding change in the accidents. His opponents took exceptions in part to the appeal 
to the senses—in part to the dialectical arguments by which he supported his opposition 
to the doctrine of the change of substance. But we will not enter more minutely upon 
the details of this dispute, on account of its specifically theological character. Cf. Les- 
sing, Ber. Twronensis, Brunswick, 1770; Staudlin, Leips. 1814, and others. This con- 
troversy exerted an unfavorable influence on the authority of the writings of John Scotus; 
for, because Berengarius in his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper had in great measure simply 
followed the work of John Scotus, De Hucharistia, the latter book was condemned (at 
the Synod at Vercelli, 1050) and the reading of his writings was altogether prohibited. 
A farther result was that the inviolability of the contents of the creed against the attacks 
of reason began now to be urged. 

Probably Lanfranc, and not Anselm, his pupil, was the author of the work: Elucidarium 
sive dialogus summam totius theologiae compleciens (formerly published among Anselm’s 
works, though its authorship was questioned; Giles, on the authority of numerous MSS., 
ascribes it to Lanfranc and has included it in the edition of his writings). In this work 
the whole substance of the dogmatics of the time is set forth in genuine scholastic 
manner, in syllogistic form and with a dialectical examination of proofs and counter-proofs. 
This form of investigation is applied also in the task of delineating and determining dog- 
matically the forms under which the conditions of men in another state are to be repre- 
sented to the imagination (e. g., in the consideration of the questions whether clothes 
will be worn in the future life, in what position the bodies of the damned are placed in 
hell, ete.). 

Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Tours (born 1057, died about 1133), was a pupil of Be- 
rengarius, whom he greatly revered. He warned against the pursuit of dialectic as danger- 
ous and vain, taking refuge, for his own part, in that simple and unquestioning faith which, 
he said, was not contrary to reason. He defined faith as voluntaria certitudo absentium, 
supra opinionem et infra scientiam constituta (Tract. Theol., ch. 1 seq.,in Opera, ed. Ant. Beau- 
gendre, Paris, 1708, p. 1010). God chooses neither to be completely comprehended—in 
order that faith may not be deprived of its proper merit—nor yet to remain wholly un- 
known—that there may be no excuse for unbelief. Hildebert seeks to prove the existence 
of God, by arguing from the creatureship of man and of all finite things, which, he reasons, 
implies the existence of an eternal cause. With his skeptical depreciation of dialectic there 
was combined a shade of mysticism. God, he taught, was above, beneath, without, and 
within the world (super totus praesidendo, subter totus sustinendo, extra totus complectendo, intra 
totus est implendo). In his Philos. Moralis Hildebert follows Cicero and Seneca. Bernard 
of Clairvaux termed Hildebert a great pillar of the Church (“tantam ecclesiae columnam).” 


§ 92. Nominalism, as the conscious and distinct stand-point of the 
opponents of Realism, first appeared in the second half of the eleventh 
century, when a portion of the Scholastics ascribed to Aristotle the 
doctrine that logic has to do only with the right use of words, and 
that genera and species are only (subjective) collections of the various 
individuals designated by the same name, and disputed the interpreta- 
tion which gave to universals a real existence. These Nominalists 


372 ROSCELLINUS AND WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX. 


were sometimes called modern dialecticians, because they opposed the 
traditional realistic interpretation of Aristotle. Among the Nomi- 
nalists of this time, the most famous is Roscellinus, Canon of Com- 
piegne, who, by his application of the nominalistic doctrine to the 
dogma of the Trinity, gave great offense and thereby occasioned the 
speedy discomfiture of Nominalism. If, as the Nominalistie theory 
affirms, only individuals exist in reality, then the three persons of the 
Godhead are three individual substances, that is, in fact, three Gods, 
and nothing but the prevalent ecclesiastical phraseology, in which 
the Godhead is only designated as threefold in person and not in 
substance, stands in the way of our speaking of these persons as three 
Gods. This consequence was openly avowed by Roscellinus, and he 
was accordingly required by the Ecclesiastical Council of Soissons 
(1092) to recant the offensive inference ; but the Nominalistic doctrine 
itself, from which it had been deduced, he appears still to have main- 
tained and taught subsequently to this time. In the period imme- 
diately following, Nominalism did not entirely disappear, yet there 
were but few who ventured openly to confess it. It was first renewed 
in the fourteenth century, particularly by William of Occam. The 
most influential opponent of Roscellinus, among his contemporaries, 
was Anselm of Canterbury. The special champion of Realism in 
France was William of Champeaux, who taught that the species 
inheres in each of the individuals included in it, essenteally, or, as he 
was afterward led by Abelard to say, indifferently. Abelard, too, 
who sought to maintain an intermediate and conciliatory position, 
opposed the extreme Nominalism of Roscellinus, his earlier teacher. 


A letter from Roscellinus to Abelard is published by J. A. Schmeller, from a Munich MS. (cod. lat. 
4643), in the Abh. der philos.-philol. Classe der k. bayr. Akad. der Wiss., V. 3, pp. 189 seq., 1851, and is 
included by Cousin in his new edition of the Complete Works of Abelard. The dissertation of Joh. Mart. 
Chladenius (De wita et haeresi Roscellini, Erl., 1756, also included in G. E. Waldau’s Thesaurus bio- et 
biblio-graphicus, Chemnitz, 1792) is now antiquated. The theological consequences of the tendencies 
arrayed against each other in the time of Roscellinus and Anselm, are developed by Bouchitté in Le 
rationalisme chrétizn ἃ la fin du onziéme siécle, Paris, 1842. 

On Williant of Champeaux, οἵ, Michaud, Guillawme de Champeaun et les écoles de Paris au Α 716 
siecle, daprés des documents inédits, Paris, 1867, 2d edition, 1868. 


Roscellinus is often named as the founder of Nominalism. Thus, for example, Otto 
von Freising (De gestis Frederici I, lib. 1) says of Roscellinus: primus nostris temportbus 
sententiam vocum instituit in logica. So, too, Anselm, Abelard, John of Salisbury, and Vincen- 
tius of Beauvais, know of no predecessor to Roscellinus. On the other hand, in the work 
entitled Bernardus triumphans, Roscellinus is termed by Caramuel Lobkowitz, “not the 
author, but the builder-up” (non autor, sed auctor) of the sect of Nominalists, and in the 
notice cited above (in the section upon John Scotus, p. 363) a Johannes (who lived prob- 
ably about 1050—not Erigena, nor John of Saxony, who was called by King Alfred, in 








ROSCELLINUS AND WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX. 378 


‘about the year 847, from France to England, where he died while Abbot of Althenay) is 
mentioned as his predecessor, and Robert of Paris and Amulph of Laon are mentioned as his 
fellows in opinion. Herman, Abbot of Tournay in the first half of the twelfth century, 
reports that about A.D. 1100 Master Raimbert of Lille taught dialectic nominalistically (dia- 
lecticam clericis suis in voce legebat), and with him many others; these men, he continues, 
had excited the enmity of Odo or Odardus, who expounded dialectic not in the modern way 
(juata quosdam modernos) or nominalistically (in voce), but realistically (in re), according to 
Boéthius and the ancient teachers. These moderns, so the writer complains, prefer to 
interpret the writings of Porphyry and Aristotle in accordance with their new wisdom, 
than according to the exposition of Boéthius and the other ancients. It is scarcely possible 
that in so short a time the school of Roscellinus had become so widely extended; the dis- 
tinction of parties must have been already developed at an earlier period. The report 
(Aventin. Annal. Boior., V1.), therefore, that Roscellinus of Brittany was the originator of 
the new school (novi lycei conditor) and that through him there arose a ‘‘new sort of Aris- 
totelians or Peripatetics,” is only in so far true, as that he was the most influential repre- 
sentative of the sententia vocum, or Nominalistic doctrine. 

Roscellinus (or Rucelinus) was born in Armorica (in Lower Brittany, therefore). He 
studied at Soissons and Rheims, resided for a time (about 1089) at Compiégne as Canon, and 
afterward at Besancon, and also taught at Tours and Locmenach (near Vannes in Brittany), 
where the youthful Abelard was among his pupils. In the year 1092 the Council of Sois- 
sons forced him to recant his tritheistic exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity. He 
appears to have written nothing, but to have delivered his opinions orally alone. There is 
extant, however, a letter, mainly about the doctrine of the Trinity, which was probably ad- 
dressed by him to Abelard. With this exception, it is only from the statements of his 
opponents, which, if not distorted, were at least colored by the influence of passion, that 
we can learn what his doctrines were. Yet it is possible in a degree to correct these 
reports by comparing them with the nominalistic utterances of others who lived earlier. 
Such a comparison furnishes us in many cases the most satisfactory commentary on the re- 
ported doctrines of Roscellinus. 

Anselm (De Fide Trin., ch. 2) speaks of ‘‘ those dialecticians of our times, those heretics 
in dialectic, who think that the so-called universal substances are only emissions of sound 
by the voice (words, flatum vocis); who are unable to understand that color is anything 
apart from the body in which it inheres, or that the wisdom of man is other than the soul 
of man;” he charges these “heretics in dialectic” with having their reason so enslaved by 
their imagination, that they are unable to set the latter aside and view apart that which 
must be considered by itself. Though the expression ‘ /latus vocis” cannot have been 
employed by the Nominalists themselves, yet it must undoubtedly have been suggested by 
something in their own phraseology, and recalls the passage above cited (p. 369) from the 
commentary of Pseudo-Hrabanus, Super Porphyriwm : res proferri non potest, nihil enim pro- 
fertur nisi vox, neque enim aliud est prolatio, nisi aéris plectro linguae percussto, which was 
intended to prove that since the genus, in conformity with the Boéthian definition, may be 
affirmed as a predicate, it cannot be a thing (res), but only a word (vow). The other stric- 
ture of Anselm, that Roscellinus was unable to distinguish between the attribute and the 
subject to which it belongs, proves that the belief of Roscellinus was in agreement with 
the above-mentioned (p. 368) doctrine of Heiricus: “If any one pronounces the word 
black or white by itself, he will not indicate thereby any particular thing, unless he says 
‘white or black man, or horse’” (si quis dixerit nigrum et album absolute, . . . per hoc non 
poterit certam rem ostendere, nisi dicat albus homo vel equus aut niger). This indeed shows 
the stricture to have been without foundation; for what the Nominalists opposed was the 


814 ROSCELLINUS AND WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX. 


passage from abstraction, or ἀφαίρεσις, to χωρισμός, or to the doctrine that that which is 
abstracted is actually and independently existent, apart from that from which it ig ab- 
stracted. Auselm, who committed the error which the Nominalists thus denounced, 
affirmed from his stand-point, not only that they did not hold to the separate existence of 
the universal (the product of abstraction), but also that they did not possess the faculty 
of abstraction; but he did not demonstrate the illegitimacy of the distinction (which, 
indeed, they themselves had, perhaps, not marked with sufficient distinctness) on which 
the stand-point of his opponents was founded. 

Anselm says further (De Fid. Trin., ch. 2): qué enim nondum intelligit, quomodo plures 
homines tn specie sint homo unus, qualiter in illa secretissima natura comprehendet, guomodo 
plures personae, quarum singula quaeque est perfectus Deus, sint Deus unus? et cujus mens 
obscura est ad discernendum inter equum suum et colorem ejus, qualiter discernet inter unum 
Deum et plures rationes (relationes) ? denique qui non potest intelligere aliud esse hominem nisi 
individuum, nullatenus ‘intelliget hominem nisi humanam personam. The contrast of the 
stand-points is here clearly presented; Realism regards the totality of similar individuals 
as constituting a real unity, the totality of men as a generic unity, wnus homo in specie; 
Nominalism, on the contrary, holds that this unity exists only in the common name, and 
that the only real unity is the individual. 

It was but logically consistent if Nominalism, which held the union of several individ- 
uals in the same genus or species to be merely the result of a subjective act, in like manner 
affirmed the distinction of parts in the individual to be only the result of a subjective act 
of analysis. That Roscellinus affirmed this consequence, appears from the statements of 
Abelard. Abelard says, in his letter concerning Roscellinus to the Bishop of Paris, that 
Roscellinus, holding that the distinction of parts in any object was merely subjective and 
verbal, and not real, held, by implication, that, for example, when we are told in the 
New Testament that Jesus ate part of a fish, we are to understand that what he really 
ate was a part of the word “fish,” and not a part of the thing which it denotes (hic 
sicut pseudo-dialecticus, ita et pseudo-christianus quum in dialectica sua nullam rem, sed solam 
vocem partes habere aestimat, ita divinam paginam impudenter pervertit, ut eo loco quo dicitur 
dominus partem piscis assi comedisse, partem hujus vocis quae est piscis asst, non partem rei 
intelligere cogatur. Id., De Divis. et Defin., p. 472 ed. Cousin: fuit autem, memini, magistri 
nostrt Roscellini tam insana sententia, ut nullam rem partibus constare vellet, sed sicut solis 
vocibus species, ita et partes adscribebat). The objection, that the wall must surely be 
regarded as a part of the house, was met by Roscellinus, according to Abelard, with the 
argument that then the wall, as being a part of the whole, must also be a part of the parts, 
of which the whole consists, viz.: of the foundation, and the wall, and the roof, ὦ. e., it 
must be a part of itself. Plainly sophistical as is this argumentation of Roscellinus in the 
awkward form in which it is here given (it is perhaps not reported with exact fidelity, or 
at least not in its complete connection with the whole teaching of Roscellinus), it never- 
theless contains the idea necessarily associated with the Nominalistic stand-point, that the 
relation of the part to the whole, like every relation, is only subjective, but that realiter 
every object exists in itself alone, related only to itself, and consequently that realiter 
nothing exists as a part, apart from the act by which we think of it as related to the 
whole, since otherwise it must be in and by itself, and when viewed by itself, a part, and 
consequently a part of itself. Understood in this sense, the argumentation appears, in- 
deed, one-sided and just as disputable as is the Nominalistic or Individualistic partisan 
stand-point itself (for the objective reality of relations can be affirmed with at least as 
much reason as it can be disputed), but it is by no means sophistical. The consequence 
drawn by Abelard, however, as to the eating of a part of the word fish, is not a necessary 





ἣν 





ROSCELLINUS AND WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX. 375 


one, for the reason that in the act of eating, an actual separation into parts takes place, 
while Roscellinus disputed only the objective validity of that division into parts which we 
make in thought and discourse. Whatever is a substance, is, according to the teaching of 
Roscellinus, as such not a part; and the part is as such not a substance, but the result of 
that subjective separation of the substance into parts, which we make in (thought and in) 
discourse. In respect to numerous divisions (e. g., of time according to centuries, of that, 
which is extended in space, according to the ordinary units of measurement, of the circle 
into degrees, etc.), which to us are indispensably necessary, and to which we are often 
naively inclined to assign an objective significance, the remark of Roscellinus is undoubt- 
edly pertinent. 

Probably the Nominalism of Roscellinus, though developed with greater logical con- 
sistency than had been shown by his predecessors, would yet not have attracted any very 
special consideration, nor have immortalized his name as that of the head of a party, had 
it not been for his tritheistic interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity, which excited 
universal attention. Like the earlier dialecticians, of whom the monk Othlo complained 
(see above, p. 370), Roscellinus accepts unconditionally the Boéthian definition of person as 
substantia rationalis; he refuses to admit that these words, when applied to the Trinity, 
are to be taken in any other than the ordinary sense, affirming that if we are in the habit 
of speaking of the Godhead as including three persons, and not three substances, this is 
but the result of custom (non igitur per personam aliud aliquid significamus quam substan- 
tiam, licet ex quadam loquendi consuetudine triplicare soleamus personam, non substantiam, 
Epist. ad Abaelardum, cited by Cousin, Ab. Opp., 11. p. 798). Generating substance and 
generated substance (substantia generans, and substantia generata), he affirms, are not identi- 
cal (semper enim generans et generatum plura sunt, non res una, secundum illam beati Augus- 
tint praefatam sententiam, quo ait, quod nulla omnino res est quae se ipswin gignat, Ibid. p. 
799). He asks why three eternal beings (tres aeterni) are not to be assumed to exist, 
seeing that the three persons of the Godhead are eternal (sz tres illae personae sunt aeternae). 
With this agrees the statement of Anselm, Mpist., II. 41: Roscellinus clericus dictt, in Deo 
tres personas esse tres res ab invicem separatas, sicut sunt tres angeli, ita tamen, ut una stt 
voluntas et potestas. De Fide Trin., ch. 3: tres personae sunt tres res sicut tres angeli aut tres 
animae, ita tamen, ut voluntate et potentia omnino sint idem. Roscellinus, says Anselm, 
advanced the argument, that, if the three persons were ‘one thing” (una res), it would 
follow that, together with the Son, the Father also, and the Holy Ghost, must have entered 
into the flesh. The affirmation of Roscellinus (which is reported also by Anselm, #p., II. 
41), that only custom opposes our speaking of the three persons of the Godhead as three 
Gods, appears, when compared with certain passages of Gregory of Nyssa and other Greek 
Church Fathers, and even with the mild judgment of St. Augustine respecting the One, 
the νοῦς (or Reason) and the World-soul as the three chief Gods of the Neo-Platonists, 
less heretical and less at variance with the common belief, than when judged in the light 
of the more rigid monotheism of St. Augustine and others, who in many regards approxi- 
mated in their teachings to the modalism of the Sabellians, and only rejected it on account 
of its incompatibility with the doctrine of the incarnation as held by the Church. What 
Anselm counter-affirmed was the reality of the generic unity of the three divine persons: 
unus Deus. For the rest, Roscellinus, who was not inclined to heresy, as such, but desired 
to hold fast to the Christian faith and to defend it, could well believe that in using the 
expression: tres substantiae (which was applied by John Scotus, among others, to the three 
divine persons), he was not in disaccord with the teaching of the Church, since he every- 
where used the word substantia in the sense of that which has an independent existence, 
in which sense it may be employed to translate the Greek word ὑπόστασις (hypostasis), 


376 ROSCELLINUS AND WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX. 


which, confessedly, is used in the plural (τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις) with reference to the three per- 
sons; his language was indeed at variance with what had become the established termi- 
nology of the Church; for in the latter the term substantia was always employed as the 
equivalent of the Greek word οὐσία (being, substance), and was, therefore, only used in the 
singular, in order to express the unity of the essence (essentia) of the divine persons; this 
usage necessarily became all the more invariable, since οὐσία has the same double significa- 
tion as substantia. 

To Sabellianism, with which Hauréau (Ph. Sc., I. p. 189 seq.) erroneously identifies the 
doctrine of Roscellinus, this doctrine offers a direct contrast, although both are founded on 
a common principle. Sabellianism reasons thus: Three persons in the Godhead are three 
Gods; now there are not three Gods, but only one; therefore there are not three persons 
in the Godhead (but only three forms of existence). Roscellinus argues, on the contrary: 
Three divine persons are three divine beings; there are three divine persons, hence 
there are three divine beings. The Sabellians affirmed that tritheism followed inevitably 
from the doctrine of Athanasius. Roscellinus accepted this consequence. The defenders 
of the doctrine of the Church, on the contrary, while agreeing with the Sabellians that tri- 
theism was an erroneous doctrine, denied that it could be deduced from the doctrine of 
Athanasius. The doctrine of Roscellinus is essentially distinguished, on the other hand, 
from the doctrine of the Arians, by its recognition of the equality in power (and will) of 
the three divine persons. Roscellinus appears originally to have believed that, with regard 
to the doctrine of the Trinity, his own doctrine was in agreement with that of Lanfranc, 
who was at that time greatly honored as the vanquisher of the heresy of Berengarius, and 
with that of Lanfranc’s pupil and successor, Anselm, until one of his hearers, named 
Johannes, addressed himself by letter to Anselm, communicating the doctrine of Ros- 
cellinus and requesting the judgment of Anselm respecting it; this was the occasion of 
Anselm’s controversy with Roscellinus. 

William of Champeaux was born about 1070, and died, while Bishop of Chalons-sur- 
Marne, in 1121. He studied first under Manegold of Lutenbach at Paris, next under the 
at that time very famous Anselm of Laon (to be distinguished from Anselmus Cantuarensis), 
and finally under Roscellinus at Compiégne, to whose doctrine, however, the doctrine of 
William, who asserts the reality of the universal (notwithstanding its immanence in re, 
ὦ. €., in the individual), was decidedly opposed. He then taught in the Cathedral School at 
Paris, where Abelard heard and disputed with him, until the year 1108, when he retired 
to the convent of St. Victor, where he assumed the functions of chorister. Yet in this 
place he soon resumed his lectures on rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, and appears to 
have laid the foundation for the mystical tendency which afterward reigned in the school 
of St. Victor. From 1113 to 1121 William was bishop of Chdlons. He remained a friend 
of St. Bernard of Clairvaux until his death. Of his works, there are extant a number on 
theological subjects (De Hucharistia and De Origine Animae; in the latter he pronounced 
himself in favor of Creationism, ὦ e., in support of the doctrine that the soul is created at 
the beginning of its earthly existence) and other works, which have been edited by Ma- 
billon, Marteéne, and Patru. There are also extant a few MSS. of his on philosophical 
problems. In the main, we are obliged to rely for our knowledge of his opinions on the 
accounts of Abelard. The latter says (in his Historia Calamitatuwm) of William of Cham- 
peaux, that he taught that universals were essentially and wholly present in each one of 
their individuals, and that in the latter there was no diversity of essence, but only a 
variety of accidents (erat autem in ea sententia de communitate universalium, ut eandem essen- 
lialiter rem totam simul singulis swis inesse adstrueret individuis, quorum quidem nulla esset in 
essentia diversitas, sed sola multitudine accidentium varietas). In reply, Abelard objects that 








ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 377 


if this were true, then the same substance must receive different and mutually incompatible 
accidents, and, in particular, the same thing must be in different places at the same time. 
(The latter objection is clearly developed in the De Gener. et Spec., apparently in the spirit 
of Abelard’s doctrine.) For if the essence of humanity is wholly present in Socrates, then 
it is not where Socrates is not. If, therefore, it is yet really also in Plato, then Plato 
must be Socrates and Socrates must be not only where he himself is, but also where Plato 
is. As a consequence of these objections, William of Champeaux is said to have modified 
his opinion and to have substituted individualiter for essentialiter in his expression of it; 
that is to say, he now taught, according to this account, that the universal substance 
exists in each individual, not in the entirety of its essence, but by virtue of individual 
modifications. But according to another lection, which, it can scarcely be doubted, is the 
correct one, the word substituted was indifferenter, so that William of Champeaux sought to 
avoid the objection of Abelard by teaching, instead of the numerical unity of each universal 
essence, its plurality unaccompanied with difference. In a passage (cited by Michaud) 
from one of the theological works of William (edited by Patru, Paris, 1847), the latter 
remarks that the word idem, the same, may be taken in two senses, the one implying the 
indifference and the other the identity in essence of the objects termed the same; thus 
Peter and Paul are the same in so far as they are both men, having the universal attribute 
of humanity, namely, rationality, although the humanity of each is more strictly speaking 
not identical, but similar; but this kind of sameness, adds William, the sameness of indif- 
ference, does not exist among the persons of the Trinity ( Vides “idem” duobus accipi modis, 
secundum indifferentiam et secundum identitatem ejusdem prorsus essentiae; secundum indiffe- 
rentiam, ut Petrum et Paulum idem dicimus esse in hoc quod sunt homines; quantum enim ad 
humanitatem pertinet, sicut iste est rationalis, et ille; sed si veritatem conjiteri volumus, non est 
eadem utriusque humanitas, sed similis, quum sunt homines. Sed hic modus unius ad naturam 
divinitatis non referendus). How it was that the problem of the Trinity led to the doctrine 
of Realism, and how the latter was thought to solve the former, appears most clearly from 
a passage (cited by Hauréau, Ph. Sc., I. p. 227) from Robert Pulleyn, who represents a 
“dialectician” of the realistic school as saying: ‘‘the species is the whole substance of 
the individuals contained in it, and the whole and same species is in each of the indi+ 
viduals; therefore the species is one substance, but its individuals are many persons, and 
these many persons are that one substance ”’ (species est tota substantia individuorum, totaque 
species eademque in singulis reperitur individuis ; itaque species una est substantia, gus vero 
individua multae personae, et hae multae personae sunt ilia una substantia). 

Toward the end of the eleventh century there was developed (as Thurot well remarks, 
Revue critique Whistoire et de littérature, 1868, No. 42, p. 249) a very active, intellectual 
movement, which was more productive of original results than was either the period pre- 
ceding it—when the interest in scientific subjects was, for the most part, very restricted in 
extent—or the succeeding period, when thought was, so to speak, buried under a mass of 
authorities. But this fact is scarcely sufficient to justify the beginning of anew period at 
this point, for the general character of mediwval philosophy, as determined by the number 
and nature of the authorities on which it depended, underwent no general change until 
about the year 1200. 


§ 98. Anselmus, born in 1033 at Aosta (Augusta Praetoria, in 
Piedmont), was in 1060 induced by the fame of Lanfranc to enter the 
convent at Bec in Normandy. In 1063 he became Prior, and in 
1078 Abbot of the same. From 1098 till his death in 1109 he was 


378 ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 


Archbishop of Canterbury, which office he administered according to 
the principles of Pope Gregory VII. The sense of his motto, “ Credo, 
ut intelligam,” is that Christians should advance from direct faith to 
whatever degree of scientific insight may be attainable by them, but 
always only on condition that the Christian creed, already fixed in 
dogmatic form (and not, as in the time of the Fathers, in process of 
development, side by side with and by the aid of philosophic and 
theological thought), remain untouched and be regarded as the abso- 
lute norm for thought. The result of examination may only be affirm- 
ative; if in any respect it is negative, thought is by that very fact 
exposed as false and sinful, the dogma sanctioned by the Church being 
the adequate doctrinal expression of the truth revealed by God. The 
fame of Anselm is connected chiefly with the ontological argument 
for God’s existence given in his “Proslogium,” and with the Christo- 
logical theory of satisfaction developed in his work: “ Cur Deus 
homo?” The ontological argument is an attempt to prove the exist- 
ence of God, as following from the very idea which we have of him. 
By the word God we understand, by definition, the greatest object or 
being that can be conceived. This conception exists in the intellect 
of all such as have the idea of God, and in the intellect of the atheist 
as well, for the atheist understands what is expressed by the words: 
the absolutely greatest. But the greatest cannot be in the intellect 
alone, for then it would be possible to conceive something still 
greater, which should exist not only in the intellect but also in 
external reality. Hence the greatest must exist at the same time in 
the intellect and in the sphere of objective reality. God, therefore, is 
not simply conceived by us; he also really exists. That this argu- 
ment is a paralogism was asserted by Gaunilo, a monk and one of 
Anselm’s contemporaries, residing at Mar-Moutier. From Gaunilo’s 
objections Anselm sought to rescue his argument in his ** Liber Apolo- 
geticus.”—According to Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, which was 
adopted by the Church, and which is substantially an application of 
juridical analogies to relations that are simply ethical and religious, 
the guilt of men, as sinners against the infinite God, is infinitely 
great, and must, therefore, according to the principles of divine jus- 
tice, be atoned for by a punishment of infinite severity. If this pun- 
ishment were to fall upon the human race, all men must suffer eternal 
damnation. But this would conflict with the divine goodness. On 
the other hand, forgiveness without atonement would conflict with 





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7. 


ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 379 


the divine justice. The only remaining alternative, therefore, by 
which at once the goodness and justice of God could be satisfied, was 
to resort to the expedient of representative satisfaction, which, in view 
of the infinite nature of our guilt, could be rendered only by God, 
since he is the only infinite being. But he could not represent the 
human race without assuming the character of a man descended from 
Adam (yet conceived without sin by the Virgin); hence the necessity 
that the second person of the Godhead should become man, in order 
that he, standing in the place of humanity, might render to God the 
satisfaction due to him, and thereby conduct the believing portion of 
humanity to salvation. 


The works of Anselm were published at Nuremberg by Casp. Hochfeder in 1491 and 1494, at Paris in 
1544 and 1549, at Cologne in 1573, 7d., by Picardus, in 1612, at Paris, by Gabr. Gerberon, in 1675, ἐδ. 1721, 
at Venice in 1744, and, more recently, at Paris, in J. P. Migne’s collection, Vol. 155, 1852. The Cur Deus 
homo ἢ has been edited more recently by Hugo Laemmer, Berlin, 1857, and by F. Fritzsche, Ztirich, 1865. The 
Monologium and Proslogium, together with the accompanying works: Gawnilonis liber pro insipiente 
and Ans. liber apologeticus, have been edited by Carl Haas and published as Part I. of Sancti Anselmi 
opuscula philosophico-theologica selecta, Tiib. 1863. Anselm’s life was written by his pupil Eadmer, a 
Canterbury monk (De vitu S. Anselmi, ed. G. Henschen, in Acta Sanctorum, t. X., p. 866 seq., and ed. Ger- 
beron in his edition of the works of Anselm); from this biography John of Salisbury and others have drawn. 
Among the modern authors who have written of Anselm, we may name Mohler, in the 72 ὁ. Quartal- 
schrift, 1827 and 1828 (reproduced in M.’s Complete Works, edited by Ddllinger, Regensburg, 1839, Vol. I., 
p. 82 seq.), G. F. Franck, Anselm v. C., Tab. 1842, Rud. Hasse, Anselm von Canterbury, Leips. 1842-52 (ef. 
Hasse, De ontologico Anselmi pro existentia Det argumento, Bonn, 1849), and Charles de Rémusat, An- 
selme de Cantorbéry, tableau de la vie monastique et de la lutte du pouvoir spirituel avec le pow. tem- 
porel au XT. siécle, Paris, 1854, 2d ed. 1868; ef. the article entitled Anselm von Canterbury als Vorkimpfer 
Sir die kirchliche Freiheit des 11. Jahrh., in G. Philipp’s and @. Gorres Hist.-Polit. Bi. fiir das kath. 
Deutschland, Vol. 42,1858. On Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, cf. C. Schwarz, Diss. de satisf. Chr. ab Ans. 
Cant. exposita, Gryph., 1841; Ferd. Chr. Baur, in his history of the doctrine of atonement and in the 
second volume of his work on the doctrine of the Trinity ; Dorner, in his history of the development of the 
person of Christ, and others, On Anselm’s doctrine of faith and knowledge, compare Ludw. Abroell, A. 
C. de mutuo fidei ac rationis consortio (diss. inaug.), Wirzburg, 1864, and Aemilius Héhne, Anselmé 
Cantuarensis philosophia cum aliorum illius aetatis decretis comparatur ejusdemque de satisfactione 
doctrina dijudicatur (diss. inaug.), Leips. 1867. [Cf. further, on Anselm's anthropology and soteriology, 
W. G. T. Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, Vol. 11., New York, 1864, pp. 111-140 and 273-286.—7r.] 


Anselm requires unconditional submission to the authority of the Church. So in- 
flexible is he on this point, that if we were to regard his doctrine as properly charac- 
terizing the period to which he belongs, we should be obliged to term it the period of 
the strictest subordination of philosophy to theology. (It is thus characterized, among 
others, by Cousin, who, in his Cowrs de (histoire de la philosophie, neuvieme lecon, Oeuvres I. 
Bruxelles, 1840, p. 190, describes the first period as that of the subordination absolue 
de la philosophie ἃ la théologie, the second as that of their alliance, and the third as the 
commencement d’une séparation). But, on the one hand, the character of the Anselmic 
philosophy was not that of the whole period, since there were other prominent thinkers 
in that period who differed from Anselm in opinion and against whom the more rigid 
churchmen were obliged to contend before carrying off the victory; and, on the other 
hand, the intention to reduce philosophy to a position of the most complete subordination, 
was very different from that actual, elaborate adaptation of it in all its parts to be an 
instrument in the service of the Church, which was effected in the period next succeeding, 


3880 ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 


notably by Thomas Aquinas and his pupils.—It is a characteristic circumstance that An- 
selm sought to establish on rational grounds, not only the existence of God, but also (what 
Thomas, Duns Scotus, and Occam subsequently declined, and only Raymundus Lullus ven- 
tured again to attempt) the Trinity and incarnation; he attempted to accomplish this by 
the aid of Platonic and Neo-Platonic doctrines. 

Anselm affirms repeatedly, as his fundamental principle, that knowledge must rest on 
faith, and not faith on a preceding knowledge developed out of doubt and speculation, 
Anselm derived this principle from Augustine (De Vera Rel., chs. 24, 45; De Utilitate Cred., 
9; De Ord., II. 9), but carried it to a greater extreme than Augustine, who, however reso- 
lutely he may have combated the Manichzeans, in their one-sided founding of faith upon 
knowledge, nevertheless admitted that faith might rest on knowledge as well as knowledge 
on faith, and required that both should reciprocally further each other (De Vera Rel., ib. ; 
Epist. 120 ad Consent., § 3). Anselm defends his position with the following argument: 
Without faith there is no experience, and without experience understanding is impossible (De 
Fide Trin., 3). Knowledge is the higher; to advance to it is the duty of every one, accord- 
ing to the measure of his capacity. Cur Deus homo? ch. 2: “ As the right order demands 
that we first receive into ourselves, believing, the mysteries of Christianity, before sub- 
jecting them to speculative examination, so it seems to me the part of negligence if, after 
having become confirmed in the faith, we do not endeavor to understand what we have 
believed.” By this, however, Anselm does not mean that, after the objects of faith have 
first been appropriated by a willing and trustful acceptation of them and the understanding 
of them has thus been made possible, the believer, now arrived at the stage of intelligence, 
is free to judge for himself concerning their truth and value (in which sense the principle 
would be identical with that which governs our relation to ancient poetry, mythology, and 
philosophy); on the contrary, he constantly affirms the absolute inviolability of the Catholic 
, doctrine. The substance of faith cannot be made more certain by means of the knowledge 
' which grows out of it, for it is in itself eternally sure and fixed; much less may it be con- 
tested. For, says Anselm, whether that is true which the universal Church believes with 
the heart and confesses with the mouth, no Christian can be permitted to place in question, 
but, while holding fast to it without doubting, and loving and living for this faith, he may 
and should search in humility for the grounds of its truth. If he is able to add to his 
faith, intelligence, let him thank God; if not, then let him not turn against his faith, but bow 
his head and worship. For human wisdom will sooner destroy itself on this rock than move 
the rock (De Fide Trinit., chs. 1, 2). In the letter which Anselm gave to Bishop Fulco, 
of Beauvais, to be delivered by him to the council which was to be held against Roscel- 
linus, he explains in a similar sense the doctrine here enunciated ( Christianus per fidem debet 
ad intellectum proficere, non per intellectum ad fidem accedere aut δὲ intelligere non valet, a fide 
recedere), and advises—with more consistency than humanity—that no discussion should be 
entered into with Roscellinus at the Synod, but that he should be at once called on to 
recant. The result could only be that the opponent remained unconvinced, with no choice 
but to become a martyr to his doctrine or to play the hypocrite and submit. Roscellinus 
at Soissons was moved, as he afterward declared, by the fear of death, to choose the latter 
alternative, openly returning, when the danger was over, to the conviction which he had in 
reality never renounced. Anselm supplemented the above advice by attempting to refute 
Roscellinus in his De Fide Trinitatis. 

The Dialogus de Grammatico, probably Anselm’s earliest work, is a dialogue between 
a teacher and his pupil on a question frequently discussed by the dialecticians of Anselnve 
time (as Anselm attests, ch. 21), viz.: whether grammaticus is to be subsumed under the 
category of substance or under that of quality. Grammatical cultivation does not belong 








ν᾽ 
fe 


ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 951 


to the essence of man, but only to the essence of the grammarian as such. Hence the 
propositions may be affirmed: omnis homo potest intelligi sine grammatica; nudlus gram- 
maticus potest intelligi sine grammatica; or, “ Kyery man can be conceived as destitute of 
grammatical knowledge,” but ‘‘No grammarian can be conceived as destitute of such 
knowledge.” By the rules of logic, it would seem to follow from these premises that no 
grammarian is man. Why is this inference not correct? Because, replies Anselm, of the 
different senses in which the premises are true: the first premise, namely, is not univer- 
sally true, except when predicated of men, considered simply as men and without reference 
to the possibility that some men may be grammarians; the second premise, on the contrary, 
is true without qualification. It only follows, therefore, that the concepts grammarian 
and man are different, but not that no grammarian isa man. If the grammarian is a man, 
he is a substance; but how then can Aristotle cite grammaticus as an example of a concept 
of quality? The word grammaticus contains two elements, grammatica and homo (the ad- 
jective and the substantive significations), the former in the word grammaticus directly (per 
se), the latter indirectly (per aliud); if we consider only the former signification, the word 
denotes a How (Quale), not a What (Quid), but if the latter, it denotes a substance, the 
homo grammaticus—a substantia prima, if an individual grammarian is meant; a substantia 
secunda, if the species is intended. Since dialectic is concerned chiefly with the means of 
expression (voces) and their signification, and only indirectly with the things named (res), 
(as Anselm teaches with Boéthius, who says in his commentary to the Categories: non de 
rerum generibus neque de rebus, sed de sermonibus rerum genera significantibus in hoc opere 
tractatus habetur), the dialectician must confine himself to the meaning which is immediately 
contained in the words per se, and must, therefore, to the question, quid est grammaticus ? 
answer : vox significans qualitatem ; for the thing directly denoted by the word grammaticus 
is the quale, the habens grammaticam, and it is only secundum appellationem that man is 
also denoted.—This work shows that Anselm also, notwithstanding his ‘‘ Realism,” viewed 
dialectic as relating especially to words (voces), and that with Aristotle he regarded the 
individual as substance in the first and fullest sense (substantia prima), and the species and 
genus as substances only in the secondary sense (substantia secunda). 

In the Dialogus de Veritate Anselm follows Aristotle in teaching that the truth of an 
affirmative or negative judgment depends on the existence or non-existence of the subject 
of the judgment; the res enwnciata is the causa veritatis of the judgment, although not its 
veritas or rectitudo as such. From the truth of the logical judgment or of thought, Anselm 
distinguishes a truth of action and of being in general, and then, with Augustine and in 
Platonic fashion, concludes from the actuality of some truth to the existence of the truth 
per se, in which all that is true must, in order to be true, participate. The truth per se is 
only a cause; the truth of being is its effect and at the same time the cause of the truth of 
knowledge; the latter is only an effect. The truth per se, the summa veritas per se subsis- 
tens, is God. 

In the Monologium (composed about 1070, before the Dial. de Verit.) Anselm constructs, | 
on the basis of the realistic theory that goodness, truth, and all other universals possess 
an existence independent of individual things, and are not merely immanent in and only 
existing through the latter (as in the case of color in material objects), a proof of the being 
of God, in which proof he follows substantially St. Augustine (De Lib. Arb., II. 3-15; De 
Vera Fel., 55 seq.; De Trin., VIII. 3, see above, p. 340; ef. Boéth., De Consol. Phil., V., Pr. 
10). There are many goods which we desire, partly as a means or for their utility ( propter 
utilitatem), and partly for their intrinsic beauty (propter honestatem). But all these goods 
are only more or less good, and therefore imply, like all things of a merely relative nature, 
something which is perfectly good and by which their worth is estimated. All relative 


8582 ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 


goods, then, necessarily presuppose an absolute good; this summum bonum is God (Monol, 
ch. 1). In like manner, all that is great or high is only relatively great or high; there 
- must, therefore, be something absolutely great and high, and this is God (ch. 2). The 
scale of beings cannot ascend in infinitum (nullo fine claudatur); hence there must exist at 
least one being, than whom no other is higher. There can, further, exist only one such 
being. For if several supreme beings, similar to each other, existed, they would all either 
participate together in one supreme essence (essentia), or be identical with it. In the 
former case, not they, but this supreme essence, would stand at the head of the scale of 
existences; in the latter case they would not be many, but one. But the one highest exist- 
ence is God (ch. 4). The Absolute exists from and by itself (ch. 6). The dependent is not, in 
respect of matter and form, derived from the Absolute, but it is created by it (ch. T seq.). 
Whatever is created does not possess in itself the power to continue in being, but requires 
the preserving presence of God (Sicut nihil factum est, nist per creatricem praesentem essentiam, 
ita nihil viget, nisi per ejusdem servatricem praesentiam, ch. 13; οἵ. Augustin., De Civ. Det, 
XII. 25; see above, p. 342, where the conservation of the world is described as a continual 
creation and the view is developed that, if God should withdraw his power and presence 
from the world, the latter would instantly sink back into nothingness). Justice among 
finite beings is derived, existing only by participation in absolute justice. But God is not 
just by participation; God is justice itself (ch. 16). In the Absolute justice is identical 
with goodness, wisdom, and every other attribute (proprietas, ch. 17); they all involve the 
attributes of eternity and omnipresence (ch. 18 seq.). God created all things by his word, 
the eternal archetype, of which creation is the copy (ch. 29 seq.). The speaker and the 
spoken word constituted a duality, though it is impossible to say what they separately are. 
They are not two spirits, nor two creators, ete. They are numerically, but not intrinsic- 
ally, distinguishable (alii, but not aliud). In their mutual relation, of which the relation 
of begetter and begotten furnishes the most pertinent image, they are two, while in their 
essence they are one (ch. 37 seq.). For the sake of preserving the divine unity, there 
must be joined with the self-duplication of the Deity a reactive tendency, a unifying pro- 
cess; just as the first consciousness of man, or memoria, becomes by reduplication 
consciousness of consciousness, or intelligentia, so the unifying tendency above mentioned 
appears in the Godhead as the reciprocal love of the Father and the Son, which proceeds 
from memoria and intelligentia, i. e., as the Holy Ghost (ch. 49 seq.). The constant and 
logically illegitimate hypostatization of abstractions, which occurs in this ‘““exemplum medi- 
tandi de ratione fidei,” is evident; Anselm himself really acknowledges that he has not 
arrived by his speculation at the conception of personality, when he affirms (ch. 78) that 
only the poverty of language compels us to express the trina wnitas by the term persona 
(or by substantia in the sense of ὑπόστασις), and that in the literal sense of the word there 
is in the supreme being no more a plurality of persons than of substances (Omnes plures 
personae sic subsistunt separatim ab invicem, ut lot necesse sit esse substantias quot sunt per- 
sonae; quod in pluribus hominibus, qui quot personae, tot individuae sunt substantiae, cognos- 
citur. Quare in summa essentia sicut non sunt plures substantiae, ita nec plures personae. 
Anselm here only advances further in the same direction in which Augustine had gone, in 
departing from the generic conception of the Trinity, which prevailed among the Greek 
theologians, such as Basilius, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa, and approach- 
ing toward Monarchianism. On the other hand, passages like the above might easily lead 
Roscellinus, who held fast to the full signification of the concept of personality, to believe 
that Anselm must confess himself at one with him in his assertion that the three persons 
were three res per se, and that they could, if usage only permitted it, be designated as three 
Gods.)—In the Monologium Anselm seeks (chs. 67-17) to explain the nature of the human 














ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 383 


spirit and to demonstrate its eternity. The human spirit is a created image of the divine 
spirit, and, like the latter, has the faculties of memory, intelligence, and love. It can and 
ought to love God as the highest good, and all else for his sake; in this love is contained 
the guarantee of its own eternity and eternal blessedness, for no end will be made to this 
blessedness either by its own will or against its will by God, since God is himself love. 
If, however, the finite spirit refuses the love of God, it must suffer eternal punishment. 
With the immutabilis sufficientia of the saved must correspond the inconsolabiiis indigentia 
of the lost. Love has its root in faith, which is the consciousness of the object of love, 
and more particularly in living faith, which involves a striving after its object (7. 6., the 
root of faith is credere in Deum, in distinction from merely credere Dewm). Love, on the 
other hand, is itself the condition of that hope which anticipates the attainment of the end 
of present strife. (The Augustinian antithesis between salvation and damnation—the 
former as depending on “faith,” and the latter as consisting in a satisfaction rendered to 
God by the eternal pain of the sinner, and termed justice—reappears in the works of 
Anselm in all its naked severity.) 


The conception of God, to which, on cosmological grounds, by a logical ascent from the ᾿ 


particular to the universal, Anselm had arrived in the Monologivm, he seeks in the Pros- 
logium (Alloquium Dei, originally entitled Fides guaerens intellectum) to justify ontologically 
by a simple development of the conception of God, 7. 6., he seeks to prove God’s existence 
as following from the very idea which we have of Him; for Anselm had been disquieted 
by the circumstance that in the proof attempted in the Monologiuwm, the demonstration of 
the existence of the Absolute had appeared dependent on the existence of the relative. 
We reproduce here the ontological argument, of which the substance is given above, p. 378, 
in Anselm’s own words, since the phraseology itself is important in deciding upon the con- 
clusiveness of the argument. Domine Deus, qui das fidei intellectum, da mihi ut, quantum 
scis expedire, intelligam quia es, sicut credimus, et hoc es quod credimus. Et quidem credimus, 
te esse bonum quo majus bonum cogitari nequit. An ergo non est aliqua talis natura, quia dixit 
tnsipiens in corde suo (according to Psalm xiv. 1): non est Deus? Sed certe idem ipse insipiens 
quum audit hoc ipsum quod dico: bonum, quo majus nihil cogitari potest, intelligit utique quod 
audit, et quod intelligit utique in ejus intellectu est, etiam si non’ intelligat illud esse. (Aliud est 
rem esse in tntellectu, et aliud intelligere rem esse. Nam quum pictor praccogitat imaginem quam 
Jacturus est, habet eam quidem jam in intellectu, sed nondum esse intelligit quod nondum fecit ; 
quum vero jam pinxit, et habet in intellectu et intelligit jam esse quod fecit.) Convincitur ergo 
insipiens esse vel in intellectu aliquid bonum quo majus cogitari nequit, quia hoc quum audit 
tntelligit, et quidquid intelligitur in intellectu est. Ad certe id quo majus cogitari nequit, nen 
potest esse in tntellectu solo. Sit enim quo majus cogilart non potest, in solo iniellectu foret, 
utique eo quo majus cogitari non potest, majus cogitart potest (sc. id, quod tale sit etiam in re). 
Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid, quo majus cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re (ch. 2). 
Hoc ipsum autem sic vere est, ut nec cogitart possit non esse. Nam potest cogitari aliquid esse, 
quod non possit cogitart non esse, quod majus est utique eo, quod non esse cogitari potest. Quare 
δὲ td, quo majus nequit cogitart, potest cogitari non esse, id ipsum quo majus cogitart nequit, non 
est id quo majus cogitari nequit, quod convenire non potest. Vere ergo est aliquid, quo majus 
cogitart non potest, ut nec cogitari possit non esse, et hoc es tu, Domine Deus noster (ch. 3). To 
the question, How then is it possible for the fool to say in his heart or to think that there is 
no God? Anselm replies by urging the difference between the mere thinking of a word or 
the being conscious of an idea, and the cognition of the reality which the word denotes 
and to which the idea corresponds (ch. 4). The paralogistic nature of the argument was 
observed by some among the contemporaries of Anselm, although the precise nature of its 
defect was not at first made perfectly clear. Every deduction from a definition is valid 


- 


il 


984 ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 


only upon the hypothesis of the existence of the subject of the definition. Thus, Xen. 
ophanes, the Eleatic, had correctly inferred from the nature of God (his existence being 
assumed) his unity and spirituality (cf. Arist., Metaph., III. 2.24: θεοὺς μὲν εἶναι φάσκοντες, 
ἀνθρωποειδεῖς δέ), and Augustine (who defined God as the highest good, than which nothing 
better can be conceived) had deduced from the definition of God his eternity: whoever 
admits that there is a God, and yet denies his eternity, contradicts himself, for eternity 
belongs to the essence of God; just so certainly as God is, is he also eternal (Augustin., 
Confess. VU. 4: non est corruptibilis substantia Dei, quando si hoc esset, non esset Deus. The 
passages, De Trin., VIII., ch. 3, and elsewhere, which are often referred to in this connec- 
tion, correspond rather with the argumentation in the Monologiwm.) That which distin- 
guishes the argumentation of Anselm from Augustine’s, is that in the former an attempt is 
made to conclude to the existence of God, and this peculiarity of the ontological argument 
constitutes its defect. The only conclusion which is logically valid is this: so surely as 
God exists, so surely is he a real being—which is a meaningless tautology—or, at the most, 
say, this: so surely as God exists, so surely does he exist not only in the mind, but also in 
nature. This latter distinction, between the (real and not merely ideal) existence of God 
in the mind of man and his existence in nature, is employed by Anselm instead of the dis- 
tinction between merely ideal and real existence. By this means the conditional clause on 
which the argument depends, viz.: if God exists, is put out of view. Anselm confounds the 
literal sense of the expression: in inftellectu esse, with its metaphorical sense. He rightly 
distinguishes between the two senses: ‘existing in the imagination,’ and ‘‘ known as 
existing in reality,” and correctly proposes to lay the former at the basis of his argumenta- 
tion. He avoids in reality the possible confusion of meanings pointed out by himself. But 
he does not avoid confounding existence in the imagination, or existence in the form of a 
mental representation—which can be metaphorically termed the existence of the (real or 
imaginary) object of the idea in the mind, but which in reality is only the existence of an 
image of that object in the mind—with real (objective, substantive) existence in the mind. 
Hence the deceitful appearance as if it were already ascertained that the object of the idea 
“God” somehow exists (namely, in the mind) and as if the condition on which all arguing 
from definitions depends, viz.: that the existence of the subject of the definition be pre- 
viously ascertained, were fulfilled, and as if all that remained were to determine more 
precisely the kind and manner of God’s existence. That which is demonstrated to be absurd 
is in reality not the belief entertained by the atheist, that God does not exist and that the 
idea of God is an objectless idea, but the belief which he neither entertains nor can be 
forced to adopt, but which Anselm supposes that he must either entertain or be forced 
to assume, viz.: that God himself (assumed as existing objectively in the mind) is an ob- 
jectless idea, existing as a merely subjective representation. This appearance is main- 
tained so long as it serves to give to the argumentation a plausible basis. But in the 
conclusion, which pretends to contain, as a result of the argumentation, not merely the 
manner of God’s existence, but the fact of his existence, the original sense of the antithesis 
between in intellectu esse and in re esse, namely: ‘exist, ideally alone, in the human con- 
sciousuess”’ and “exist in reality,” is resumed. Anselm’s argument was combated in an 
anonymous Liber pro Insipiente by a monk named Gaunilo of the Convent of Marmoutier 
(Majus Monasterium, not far from Tours; according to Marténe, in his manuscript history 
of the convent, ap. Ravaisson, Rapports sur les bibliothéques de 1 Ouest, Paris, 1841, Append. 
XVIL, Gaunilo was a Count of Montigni, who, after meeting in 1044 with some misfor- 
tunes resulting from personal feuds, entered the convent, where he lived till as late as 1083). 
Gaunilo, who speaks of the other contents of the Proslogiwm in terms of great respect, 
points out correctly the weak place in Anselm’s argument. He remarks that it does not 








ANSELM OF CANTERBURY. 385 


follow from the fact that we have and that we understand the conception of God, that God 
so exists in the intellect that we may conclude from this to his existence in reality; that 
“than which nothing greater can be conceived” does not exist in the human intellect in 
any other sense than that in which all objects that we know exist there: an imaginary 
island, of which we may have a conception, exists in the intellect just as much as God 
does when we haye a conception of him. If the being of God “in the intellect” were Ὁ 
taken in the fuller sense of ‘‘knowing that he exists” (itelligere rem esse)—which, how- 
ever, Anselm himself disavows—this would amount to presupposing that which was to be 
proved. The real existence of the object must be ascertained beforehand, if from its 
essence we would deduce its predicates (Prius enim certum mihi necesse est fiat, re vera esse 
alicubi majus ipsum, et tum demum ex 60 quod majus est omnibus, in se ipso quogue subsistere 
non erit ambiguum). Gaunilo then seeks to demonstrate that Anselm’s argument proves 
too much, since, in a similar manner, the existence of a perfect island might be proved. 
But Anselm, in his rejoinder, the Liber apologeticus adversus respondentem pro insipiente, 
denied the pertinence of the latter objection, expressing his confidence that his argu- 
ment applied to that being, and only to that one, than whom a greater could not be con- 
ceived (practer quod majus cogitari non possit), though without showing with what reason 
he restricted the application of his argument to that particular instance; and in his explana- 
tions relative to that expression in which the defect of the argument is to be sought 
for—for Gaunilo had not exposed with complete logical definiteness what was deceptive in 
the metaphor “in intellectu esse’’—he fell back into the old mistake of making cogitari and 
intelligi (the thought or conception of an object) synonymous with its esse in cogitatione vel 
intellectu (or its real existence in thought or in the intellect), so that constantly and without 
consciousness of the absurdity of the act, he compares with each other two beings, one of 
which is conceived but does not exist, while the other is both conceived and exists, and 
then concludes that the latter is greater, by the fact of existence, than the former; the 
greatest conceivable being, being in the intellect, must, says Anselm, not only be in the 
intellect, but must also exist out of the intellect and in reality. The idea of a being, than 
whom none greater can be conceived, as existing solely in the intellect, is, indeed, contra- 
dictory. But the contradiction in the idea does not prove the existence of such a being in 
reality; it proves rather that the affirmation, that when such a being is conceived by the 
intellect, it zs in the intellect, is literally false and inadmissible; at all events, it is not 
admissible until existence has been proven; for only under the presupposition that God 
exists, and not for the purpose of establishing this postulate itself, can (with Augustine, Jn 
Joh. Ev., ch. 3, Tract. XVI.: ‘‘crescat ergo Deus, qui semper perfectus est, crescat in te; 
quanto enim magis intelligis Deum et quanto magis capis, videtur in te crescere Deus”) our 
knowledge of God be described as God’s existence in us, and the growth of that knowledge 
as the growth of God in us. The other deficiency of the argument, that, namely, the 
indeterminate conception of that than which nothing greater can be thought, is still far 
removed from the conception of a personal God, Anselm sought to supply (ch. 5 seq.) by the 
logical development of the concept of ‘‘the Greatest,” showing that the Greatest must be 
conceived as creator, spirit, almighty, merciful, ete. The opinion often expressed in 
modern times, and especially by Hasse (Anselm, II. pp. 262-272), that the ontological 
argument stands or falls with Realism, is incorrect. The reverse is, indeed, true of the 
arguments employed in the Monologiwm, for these are founded on the Platonie- Augustinian 
theory of ideas. But there is no necessary connection between Realism, which teaches 
that our subjective conceptions correspond with real universals known through the former, 
and what is the characterizing feature of the ontological argument, viz.: the confusion 
of intelligi with esse in intellectu, or, in other words, the deduction of real existence in 
25 


ἃ! 


386 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


| 
| 
| 


the intellect from the presence of an idea in the intellect. Realism does, indeed, inyolve 
the presupposition (which, for the rest, not even Nominalism, as such, altogether rejects, 
the presupposition, which Skepticism only leaves undecided, and which Criticism combats 
by its distinction between empirical and transcendental objectivity), that necessity in 
thought is a proof of objectively real existence; but this presupposition is very different 
from the confusion that lies at the foundation of the ontological argument, of the idea 
with the object of the idea, conceived as existing in the mind. Realism affirms only that 
that, in regard to which the proposition or the logical judgment, that it exists, has been 
categorically (not merely hypothetically) and without logical error demonstrated, exists in 
reality, but not that that, which we, whether arbitrarily or with subjective necessity, think, 
or the idea of which we understand, itself exists in any literal sense in this our thought or 
understanding of it, or that on account of this thought or understanding it is to be 
recognized as having objective reality. (It is nevertheless not to be denied, that the con- 
fusion above described was peculiarly natural in connection with the form of Realism held 
by Anselm.) 

Of the work entitled: Cur Deus homo? the first book was written in 1094 and the 
second in 1098. Init Anselm treats of the doctrine of redemption and atonement. It is 
Anselm’s merit in this work that he gets beyond the theory of a ransom paid to the devil— 
a theory which until his time had been very widely accepted, and which, as held by several 
of the Fathers of the Church (Origen and other Greeks, Ambrosius, Leo the Great, and 
others) had extended to the avowal that God had outwitted the devil. For the notion of a 
conflict between God’s grace and the rights of the devil (as asserted even by Augustine, De 
Lib. Arbitr., 111. 10), Anselm substitutes the notion of a conflict between the goodness and 
justice of God, which conflict, he asserts, came to an end with the incarnation. The 
defect of his theory (a defect only in conformity with the medizeval tendency to emphasize 
the aspect of opposition between God and the world) is the transcendence of the act of 
atonement, in his view of it, in that, although accomplished through the humanity of Jesus, 
it is represented as exterior to the consciousness and intention of the men to be redeemed, 
so that stress is laid rather on the judicial requirement that guilt should be removed, than 
on the ethical requirement of a purified will. The Pauline ‘dying and rising with Christ” 
is left out of consideration; the subjective conditions of the appropriation of salvation are 
not discussed; the equal salvation of all men seems logically to follow from the doctrine 
of Anselm. and the confinement of Christ’s merit to those who accept grace by faith could 
not, therefore, but appear arbitrary. Thus it was possible that the Church, holding this 
doctrine, should think of making this appropriation of grace dependent on other, more con- 
venient conditions, and finally on the purchase of indulgences. The objective and divine 
aspect was realistically emphasized and the subjective and individual element, the element 
of human personality (which, per contra, Nominalism could emphasize to the point of 
destroying the community of nature belonging to different persons) was placed in the 
background. This deficiency necessarily called forth in the succeeding period a reforma- 
tory movement, which. directed at first only against the extreme consequences of the 
defective doctrine, terminated in an ethical and religious transformation of its fundamental 
conception. Yet this mere suggestion of these specifically theological points may suffice 
here. 






et AJ Ln 71, mee - Ἄν. oy ee oil τ 30 


fr 


8. 94. Petrus Abelardus (Abeillard, or Abélard), was born in 1079, 
at Pallet (or Palais), in the county of Nantes. He was educated under 
Roscellinus, William of Champeaux, and other Scholastics. He then 


ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 387 


taught in various places—in particular, from 1102 till about 1136, at 
Paris, though with several interruptions—and died in 1142, at the 
priory of St. Marcel, near Chalons-sur-Sadne. In dialectic he adopted 
a position by which he avoided at once the Nominalistic extreme of 
Roscellinus and the Realistic extreme of William of Champeaux. 
His doctrine was, however, not far removed from strict Nominalism. 
He taught that the universal exists not in words as such, but in 
affirmations, or in words considered in reference to their signification 
(sermones). The forms of things existed in the divine mind before 
the creation, as conceptions (conceptus mentis). In his /ntroduction 
to Theology, Abelard lays down the principle that rational insight 
must prepare the way for faith, since without that faith is not sure of 
its truth. In opposition to the tritheism of Roscellinus, and by | 
employing the Augustinian terminology, he gives to the doctripe of | 
the Trinity a Monarchian interpretation, explaining the three persons 
as being God’s power, wisdom, and goodness, and yet not denying the 
personality of those attributes. He interprets the Platonic world-soul 
as meaning the Holy Ghost or the divine love in its relation to the 
world, in so far as this love bestows goods on all men, Jews and hea- 
then included. In Ethics Abelard lays stress on the state of the 

heart; it is not the act as such, but the intention, on which sin and | 
virtue depend. Whatever is not in conflict with the conscience, is 


‘not sinful, although it may be faulty, since conscience may err; the 


harmony of the will with the conscience is then only a sufficient evi- 
dence of one’s virtue, when the conscience holds that to be good or 
pleasing to God which in reality is such. Bernard of Chartres, Wil- 
liam of Conches, and Adelard of Bath, held a Platonism modified by 
Christian elements, but they carefully maintained the authority of the 
Aristotelian doctrine with reference to our knowledge of the world 
of sensation. Among the logicians of those times may be mentioned, 
as representatives of various forms of Realism, Walter of Mortagne, 
and especially Gilbertus Porretanus, the author of a Commentary to 
(Pseudo-) Boéthius’ De Trinitate and De Duabus Naturis in Christo, 
and of a work on the last six categories. Abelard’s pupil, Petrus 
Lombardus, the ‘‘ Magister Sententiarum,” prepared a manual of 
theology, which for a long time was universally employed as the basis 
of theological instruction and a guide for the dialectical treatment of 
theological problems. The mystical theologians, like Bernard of 
Olairvaux, Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, took ground in opposition 


τ 


388 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


to the high estimate placed on dialectic, and especially in opposition 
to its application to theology. John of Salisbury, the erudite and 
elegant author, labored as an opponent of the narrow scholastic logic 
of dispute, and in favor of the union of classical studies with the 
Scholastic theology. Alanus “ab nsulis” (of Lille) composed a sys- 
tem of ecclesiastical theology founded on rational principles. Amal- 
rich of Bene and David of Dinant renewed doctrines found in the 
works of Dionysius Areopagitica and John Scotus Erigena, panthe- 
istically identifyimg God with the essence of the world. Alanus, 
David, and probably Amalrich, were acquainted with a number of 
works translated from the Arabic. 


A part of the works of Abelard, including, in particular, his correspondence with Heloise, his Com. 
mentary on the Romans, and his Introduction to Theology, were first published from the MSS. of Frangois 
d'Amboise, state counsellor, by Quercetanus (Duchesne), Paris, 1616; the Theologia Ohristiana woe 
printed first in the Thesaurus Novus Anecdotorum of Marténe and Durand, Vol. V., 1717, the Hthics ov 
the Scito te ipswn, in the Thesaurus Anecdotorum Novissimus, by B. Pez, Vol. III., 1721; the Dialogue 
inter philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum, by F. H. Rheinwald (Berlin, 1831), who has also published ay 
Epitome Theologiae Christianae, by Abelard, Berlin, 1825; the Dialogus was also included by Victor Cousis, 
in the Ouvrages inédits dAbélard, Paris, 1836, as were also, among other things, the theological work: 
entitled Sic οὐ Non, which is made up of contradictory sayings of the Church Fathers, and is not completa, 
the Dialectic of Abelard, the fragment De Generibus et Speciebus, ascribed by Cousin to Abelard, ant 
Glosses to the Jsagoge of Porphyry, to Aristotle’s Categ.and De Interpretatione and to the Topica of 
Boéthius; a complete edition of the works of Abelard was afterwards set on foot by Cousin (Petri Abae- 
tardi opera hactenus seorsim edita nune primum in unum collegit, teatwm rec., notas, argum., indices 
adj. Victor Cousin, adjuwante C. Jourdain, Vol. I., Paris, 1849, Vol. II., ἐδέα. 1859); the first complete 
edition of the Sic et Non was edited by E. L. Th. Henke and G. Steph. Lindenkohl, Marburg, 1851. Abe~ 
lard’s theological writings fill the 178th volume of Migne’s Patrol. Cursus Completus. 

The life of Abelard was recounted by himself in the Historia Calamitatum Mearum ; of his life, and 
especially of his relations with Heloise, treat Gervaise, Paris, 1720, John Berington, Birmingham and Lon- 
don, 1787, German translation by Samuel Hahnemann, Leipsic, 1789, Fessler, 1806, Fr. Chr. Schlosser, 
Abdalard und Dulcin, Leben und Meinungen eines Schwirmers und eines Philosophen, Gotha, 1807, 
Guizot, Paris, 1839. Ludw. Feuerbach, Abdlard und Heloise, 2d edition, Leipsic, 1844; the work entitled 
Les amours, les malheurs et les ouwvrages d’Abélard et Heloise, published in 1616, was republished by 
Villemain, Paris, 1835. Cf. also B. Duparay, Pierre le Vénérable, abbe de Cluny, sa vie, ses wuvres et la 
société monastique au douziéme siécle, Chalons-sur-Sadne, 1862. On his dogmaties and ethics, Frerichs 
(Jena, 1827), on the principles of his theology, Goldhorn (Leipsic, 1836, ef. Zeitsch. 7. hist. Theol., 1866, 
No. 2, pp. 162-229), and on his scientific importance as a philosopher and theologian, Cousin (in his Intro- 
duction to the Owvrages Inéd., Paris, 1836), and J. Bornemann (in Anselmus et Abaelardus sive initia 
scholasticismi, Havniz, 1840) have written. The most complete work on Abelard is Charles de Rémusat's 
Abélard, Paris, 1845 [ef. North American Review, Vol. 88, 1859, pp. 182-166.—77r.], which contains parts 
of the still inedited Glossulae super Porphyrium by Abelard (different from the Glossae published in the 
Our, Inéd.), though some of those which are of decisive import are given only in a French paraphrase. 
J. L. Jacobi, Abdlard und Heloise, Berlin, 1850; A. Wilkens, Peter Addlard, Bremen, 1855; G. Schuster, 
Ab. u. Heloise, Wamburg, 1860; Ed. Bonnier, Ab. et St. Bernard, Paris, 1862; H. Hayd, Ab. und seine 
Lehre, Regensburg, 1863; O. Johanny de Rochely, St. Bernard, Abélard et le Rationalisme Moderne, 
Paris and Lyons, 1867. 

Several copies of the work of Bernard of Chartres on the AMegacosmus and Microcosmus are contained 
in the Imperial Library at Paris; parts of it are published by Cousin in the Supplement to the Ouvrages 
Inéd. @ Abélard, pp. 627-689; ibid. 640-644 are extracts from Bernard’s allegorical explanation of the 
Aeneid of Virgil. 

The work of William of Conches on Nature, under the title: Magna de Naturis Philosophia, was 
published in 1474; the beginning of the Philosophia Minor was printed under the title περὶ διδάξεων in the 
works of Beda Venerabilis, Basel, 1563, Cologne, 1612 and 1688, IL, p. 206 seq.; Cousin (Owvrages inéd. 





‘ 
4 
7 





sas 


ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 389 


ad Abélard, pp. 669-977) has published parts of the Secunda and Tertéa Phicosophia (Anthropology and 
Cosmology) by the same author; extracis from the Glossae to the De Consolat. Philos. are given by Ch. 
Jourdain in Notices et Extraits, etc., XX. 2, 1861; perhaps (according to Hauréau’s conjecture) William of 
Conches is to be regarded as the author of the Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato, from which Cousin 
(who ascribes it to Honorius of Autun, who lived at the beginning of the twelfth century) has published 
extracts in the Supplement to the Owor. Inéd. d)Ad., pp. 643-651. The Dragmaticon (thus spelled instead 
of Dramaticon) Philosophiae, his last work, has been edited under the title of Dialogus de substantiis 
physicis confectus a Wilhelmo Aneponymo philosopho industria Guil. Grataroli, Strasburg, 1583. Cf. 
Hauréau, Singularités historiques et littéraires, Paris, 1861 (cited above, p. 356). 

Fragments of the De Hodem et Diverso, by Adelard of Bath, are given in A. Jourdain’s Rech. Crit., 
2d edition, 1843, pp. 258-277. On physical philosophy in the twelfth century, a work was published by Ch. 
Jourdain, at Paris, in 1838. : 

Letters on theological topics, by Walter of Montagne, are printed in D’Achery’s Spicilegium, ed. de la 
Barre, Paris, 1723, III., p. 520 seq. Mathoud, also, in his edition of the Works of Robert Pulleyn (Paris, 
1655) gives some extracts from the writings of the same author. 

The commentary on (Pseudo-) Boéthius de Trinitate, by Gilbertus Porretanus, is included in the 
edition of the writings of Boéthius, published at Basel, 1570, pp. 1128-1273; his work De Sew Principiis 
was published in the oldest Latin editions of Aristotle, in connection with the Organon,—separate edition 
by Arnold Woesterfeld, Leipsic, 1507. Cf., concerning him, Lipsius, in Ersch and Gruber’s Zncyel,, Sect. L., 
Part 67. 

Petri Lombardi libri quatuor sententiarum was published at Venice, in 1477, Basel, 1516, Cologne, 
1576, ete., and is also included in the 192d Vol. of Migne’s Patrologie; the Sentences of Robertus Pullus, 
and of Peter of Poitiers, were edited by Mathoud, Paris, 1655; Du Boulay, in his Hist. Univers. Par., and 
Hauréan, Ph. Se., I., p. 382 seq., publish fragments of the Quaestiones de Divina Pagina or Summa 
Theologiae, by Robert of Melun. 

Bernardi Clarevaliensis Opera, ed. Marténe, Venice, 1567; ed. Mabillon, Paris, 1696 and 1719; on him, 
Neander (Berlin, 1813, 3d edition, 1865), Ellendorf (Essen, 1837), and G. L. Plitt (in Niedner’s Zeitscar. fiir 
histor. Theologie, 1862, pp. 163-288), have written. Mugonis a 8. Victore Opera, Paris, 1524; Venice, 1588; 
Stud. et industr. Canonicorum abbat. S. Vict., Rouen, 1648, and in Migne’s Patrol., Vols. 175-177; of him 
write A. Liebner (Leipsic, 1836), Hauréau (Paris, 1860), and Ed. Bohmer (in the “ Damaris,” 1864, No. 3). 
Richardi a 8. Vict. Opera, Venice, 1506; Paris, 1518; in Migne’s Putrol., Vol. 194; on him ef. Engel- 
hardt, Rich. v. S. Vict. und Johannes Ruysbroeck, Erlangen, 1838. Wilhelm Kaulich, Die Lekren des 
Hugo u. Richard von St. Victor, in Abh, der Bohm. Gesellschaft der Wiss., 5th Series, Vol. XIII, for the 
years 1863 and 1864, Prague, 1865 (also published separately). Cf. concerning the orthodox, as also concern- 
ing the heretical Mystics of that period, Heinrich Schmid, Der Mysticismus in seiner Entstehungsperiode, 
Jena, 1824; Gorres, Die christl. Mystik, Regensb. 1836-42; Helfferich, Die christl. Mystik, Hamburg, 1842; 
Noack, Die christl. Mystik des Mittelalters, Konigsberg, 1853. 

The Policraticus sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum of John of Salisbury appeared 
first in an edition without date at Brussels, about 1476, then at Lyons, 1513, ete.; the Letters were pub- 
Jished at Paris (ed. Masson), in 1611, and with the Policratus in the Bibl. Max. Patrwm, Lyons, 1677, Vol. 
XXIII; the Metalogicus, Paris, 1610, etc.; the Hntheticus (Nutheticus), together with literary and his- 
torical investigations by Christian Petersen, Hamburg, 1843; complete edition of works, by J. A. Giles, 5 
vols., Oxford, 1848, reproduced in Migne’s Patrolog., Vol. 199. On him, ef. Herm, Reuter, Joh. v. 8. eur 
Gesch. der christl. Wissenschaft im zwélften Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1842; Carl Schaarschmidt, J. Αἱ in- 
seinem Verhdltniss zur class. Litteratur, in the Rhein. Mus. f. Ph., new series, XIV., 1858, pp. 200-284, 
and Johannes Saresberiensis nach Leben und Studien, Schriften und Philosophie, Leipsic, 1862. 

Alani ab insgulis Op. ed. de Visch, Antwerp, 1658. De arte catholicae jidei ed. Pez,in Thes. anecd., 
Vol. I. The most complete collection of his works is contained in Vol. 120 of Migne’s Patrologia. 

Hahn treats of Amalrich and the Amalricans in Theol. Stud. u. Krit., 1846, No. 1; of Amalrich of 
Bena and Dayid of Dinant, Kronlein treats, 7déd., 1847, pp. 211-880, 


In addition to the great talent of Abelard as a teacher and his conflicts with the Church 
(he was condemned by two Synods, at Soissons in 1121, and at Sens in 1140), his unfor- 
tunate love-relations with Heloise, the niece of the revengeful Canon Fulbert, have made 
his name popular. Abelard taught dialectic at Melun, then at Corbeil, afterward at Paris 
in the school connected with the Cathedral, and again at Mount Sainte-Geneviéve and in 
the Monastery of St. Dionysius; in the Cathedral School at Paris he also gave theological 
instruction. (From the union of the schools of logic at Mount St. Geneviéve with the 


390 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


theological school in the Convent of Notre-Dame arose the University of Paris; the instruct- 
‘ors and scholars formed a corporation, Universitas Magistrorwm, or, in the language gen- 
erally employed in the papal bulls of the ‘thirteenth century, ‘‘ Universitas magistrorum et 
scholarium Parisiis studentium.” Till about the year 1200 the University had been under 
the more or less arbitrary control of the Chancellor of the Chapter of Notre-Dame; its cor- 
porate independence was secured to it by Innocent III. See Thurot, p. 11 of the work 
cited above), Rémusat very justly describes the instruction given by Abelard as indicating 
‘rather an originality of talent than of ideas ” (Abéi., I. p.31). Victor Cousin says (Ouvrages 
inéd. d)Ab., Introduct., p. VI.): “Τὸ is the regular and systematic application by Abelard 
of dialectic to theology, which constitutes perhaps his most signal title to a place in his- 
tory.” From the time of Charlemagne, says Cousin (p. III. seq.), grammar and elementary 
logic and dogmatics were indeed more or less taught, but dialectic was scarcely at all 
introduced into theology; this it remained for Abelard mainly to do. ‘‘ Abelard is, there- 
fore, the principal founder of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, so that it is at once 
France that gave to Europe in the twelfth century Scholasticism by Abelard, and, at the 
commencement of the seventeenth century, in Descartes, the destroyer of this same phi- 
losophy and the father of modern philosophy” (p. IV.). These statements contain some 
truth, but great exaggeration. Before Abelard, Anselm had applied dialectic to theology 
with all the skill of a virtuoso, and had in his way rationalized dogmatics; with still greater 
genius had John Scotus Erigena, following in the lead of Dionysius Areopagitica, and 
hence of the Neo-Platonists, made the same application, which, for the rest, the Greek 
Church Fathers and Augustine, in particular, also did in a greater or less measure; the 
interval between John Scotus and Anselm was also filled with many noticeable attempts to 
apply dialectic to theological questions, especially to the doctrines of the Eucharist and the 
Trinity. Abelard, therefore, simply went further in a way which had already been opened 
up. That which is peculiar to him is rather his facile and elegant style, than the strictly 
dialectical form of his reasoning; although it is to be confessed that he contributed very 
materially toward assuring the permanent adoption of the dialectical form in theological 
discussions. In comparison with the rigid orthodoxy of Anselm, he shows what for his 
times was a rather strong rationalistic tendency. 

Abelard, like all the Scholastics of his time, was acquainted with no Greek works, 
except in Latin translations; Plato he knew only from the quotations of Aristotle, Cicero, 
Macrobius, Augustine, and Boéthius, but not, so far as appears, from the translation by 
Chalcidius of a part of the dialogue Timaeus, which he might have seen; and of Aristotle’s 
works, he was unacquainted not only with the Physics and Metaphysics, but also with both 
the Analytics, the Topics, and the De Soph. Elenc.; he knew only the Categ. and De Inier- 
pretatione. He says himself, in his Dialectic (composed in the latter part of his life, prob- 
ably 1140-42, see Cousin, p. 228 seq.): Sunt autem tres, quorum septem codicibus omnis in 
hac arte eloquentia latina armatur: Aristotelis enim duos tantum, Praedicamentorum scilicet et 
Periermenias libros, usus adhuc Latinorum cognovit, Porphyrii vero unum, qui videlicet de quin- 
que vocibus conscriptus, genere scilicet, specie, differentia, proprio et accidente, introductionem ad 
ipsa praeparat Praedicamenta ; Boéthti autem quatuor in consuetudinem duaximus libros, videlicet 
Divisionum et Topicorum cum Syllogismis tam categoricis quam hypotheticis. He confesses 
in the same work (p. 200) his ignorance of the Physics and Metaphysics, and adds that he 
could not learn Plato’s dialectic from Plato’s own writings, because the latter were not 
translated (p. 205 seq.). In the time next succeeding the time of Abelard, and in part 
during his life, the other logical writings of Aristotle became generally known; and 
Abelard must himself (as Prantl shows, Gesch. der Log., pp. 100 seq.) have had some 
indirect knowledge of the contents of these writings before he composed his Dialectica. 





ae ας τ es 


λ 
un 


or. 


— 





ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 391 


To a passage in the Chronica of Robert de Monte, relating to the year 1128, an ‘‘aka 
manus ””—which, according to Pertz (Monum., VIII. p. 293), likewise belonged to a person 
of the twelfth century—has added the notice: Jacobus Clericus de Venetia transtulit de 
graeco in latinum quosdam libros Aristotelis et commentatus est, scilicet Topica, Analyt. Pr. A 
Post. et Elenchos, quamvis antiquior translatio haberetur. The “earlier translation” of these 
parts of the Organon was that of Boéthius, which, however, was not widely circulated, 
and the new translation did not at once become universally known and had not been seen 
by Abelard when he wrote his Dialectic. Gilbertus Porretanus, who died in 1154, cites 
the Aristotelian Analytics as a work already generally known. His disciple, Otto of Frei- 
sing, was the first, or one of the first, to bring into Germany the Topica, the Analytics, and 
the Elench. Soph.—perhaps in the translation of Boéthius. John of Salisbury knew not 
only these, but also other new translations, in which greater literalness had been aimed at. 
That part of the Organon, which first became known about the middle of the twelfth cen- 
tury, was for centuries termed ‘‘ Nova Logica,” and the part previously known, “ Vetus 
Logica.” With this distinction must not be confounded that of ἃ ‘‘ Logica Antiqua” (or 
Antiquorum), which included the Nova as well as the Vetus Logica, and a ‘‘ Logica Moderna” 
(Modernorum), which will be treated of in §§ 95 and 103. 

In dialectic Abelard recognizes Aristotle as the highest authority. In speaking of a 
difference between Aristotle and Plato as to the definition of the Relative, Abelard (Dial., 
p. 204) employs language which illustrates characteristically the dependence of men in his 
time on authority. He says: ‘‘It were possible to choose a middle course; but that may 
not be, for if we suppose Aristotle, the leader of the Peripatetics, to have been in fault, what 
other authority shall we receive in matters of this kind (st Aristotelem Peripateticorum principem 
culpare praesumamus, quem amplius in hac arte recipiemus)? There is only one thing in 
Aristotle which Abelard cannot suffer, and this is his polemic against Plato, his teacher. 
Abelard prefers by a favorable interpretation of the words of Plato to pronounce both 
master and scholar in the right (Dial., p. 206).—These views belonged indeed to the old 
age of Abelard. In contending against the dialecticians of his times, he sometimes de- 
preciated their leader, Aristotle, when he seemed to come in conflict with theological 
authority (Theol. Christ., I1., p. 1275; ib., 1282: ‘ Aristoteles vester”’). 

Abelard ascribes to dialectic the work of distinguishing the true and the false (Dial, 
p- 435: verttatis sew falsitatis discretio. Glossulae super Porphyrium, ap. Rémusat, p. 95: est 
logica auctoritate Tullit (cf. Boéth., ad Top. Cic., p. 162) diligens ratio disserendt, i. e., discretio 
argumentorum per quae disseritur 1%. 6. disputatur). Logical distinction is accomplished by 
distinguishing between the different applications of words (discretio tmpositionis vocum, 
Dial., p. 350; ef. p. 351: St quis vocum impositionem recte pensaverit, enuntiationum quarum- 
libet veritatem facilius deliberaverit, et rerum consecutionis necessitatem velocius animadverterit. 
Hoc autem logicae disciplinae proprium relinquitur, ut scilicet vocum impositiones pensando, 
quantum unaquaque proponatur oratione sive dictione discutiat; physicae v:ro proprium est 
inquirere utrum rei natura consentiat enuntiationt, utrum ita sese, ut dicitur, rerum pro- 
prietas habeat vel non). Physics is presupposed by logic, for the peculiarities of objects 
must be known in order to the right application of words (ibid.). Words, as Abelard, 
according to the then universal opinion and in Peripatetic language teaches, were invented 
by men to express their thoughts; but thoughts must conform to things (Theol. Christ., 
p- 1275: vocabula homines instituerunt ad creaturas designandas, quas intelligere potuerunt, 
quum videlicet per tla vocabula suos intellectus manifestare vellent. Cf. ib., p. 1162 seq. on 
the cognatio between the sermones and intellectus. Dial., p. 487: neque enim vox aliqua natu- 
raliter rei significatae inest, sed secundum hominum impositionem ; vocis enim impositionem 
summus artifex nobis commisit, rerum autem naturam propriae suae dispositioni reservavit, 


392 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


unde et vocem secundum impositionis suae originem re significata posteriorem liquet esse). But 
because human speech is of human origin, it is not therefore arbitrary, but it has in the 
objects it expresses its norm (Introd. ad theol., 11. 90: constat juxta Boéthium ac Platonem, 
cognatos de quibus loquuntur rebus oportere esse sermones). 

The position of Abelard with reference to the problem of Nominalism and Realism, or 
the doctrine of universals, is still a subject of dispute. In his Dialectic he does not ex- 
pressly take up the subject. In the Glossae in Porphyriwm he contents himself with an 
explanation of the literal sense of the passage in Porphyry, which only defines the problem 
itself. It is only in the Glossulae super Porphyritum that he expresses his own views. But 
these Glossulae exist only in MS.; Rémusat has published many passages from this work, 
but has failed to give the Latin text of precisely those passages which were of de- 
cisive importance. Furthermore, the treatises De Jntellectibus and De Generibus, from which 
results less equivocal could have been derived, have been incorrectly ascribed to Abelard. 
Still it is possible to discern the main points of his doctrine. John of Salisbury describes 
it as a modification of the Nominalism of Roscellinus, that Abelard found the universal, 
not in the words (voces) as such, but in words as employed in sentences (sermones); the 
main argument employed against Realism by the representatives of this doctrine, he 
adds, was that a thing cannot be predicated of a thing, but that the universal is that 
which is predicable of many things, and is, therefore, not a thing (Joh. Sal., Metalog., 
11. 17: alius sermones intuetur et ad illos detorquet quidquid alicubi de universalibus meminit 
scriptum ; in hac autem opinione deprehensus est peripateticus Palatinus Abaelardus noster ;— 
rem de re praedicari monstrum dicunt). With this agree Abelard’s own expressions. He 
says (Dial., p. 496): ‘According to us, it is not a thing, but only a name, which can be 
predicated of several objects” (nec rem ullam de pluribus dici, sed nomen tantum concedimus). 
But he defines the universal (Rémusat, IT. 104) as that whose nature it is to be predicated 
of several objects (quod de pluribus natum est praedicari, following Arist., De Jnterpret., 
ch. 7: τὰ μὲν καθόλου τῶν πραγμάτων͵ τὰ δὲ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον͵ λέγω δὲ καθόλου μὲν ὃ ἐπὶ πλειόνων 
πέφυκε κατηγορεῖσθαι, καθ᾽ ἕκαστον δὲ ὃ pH, οἷον ἄνθρωπος μὲν τῶν καθόλου, Καλλίας δὲ τῶν 
καθ᾽ ἕκαστον). The universality, therefore, is contained in the word; yet not in the word as 
such, as though this were itself anything universal (for every word is but a particular single 
word), but in the word applied to a class of objects, or in the word so far as it is predicated 
of these objects, hence in the sentence, sermo; only metaphorically are the objects them- 
selves called universals. Says Rémusat (II. p. 105): Ce n'est pas le mot, la voix, mats le 
discours, sermo, Cest ἃ dire Vexpression du mot, qui est attribuable ἃ divers, et quoique les 
discours soient des mots, ce ne sont pas les mots, mais les discowrs qui sont universels. Quant 
aux choses, sil était vrai qwune chose pit s’affirmer de plusieurs choses, une seule et méme 


chose se retrouverait également dans plusieurs, ce qui répugne. Ibid., p. 109: il décide que 


bien que ces concepts ne donnent pas les choses comme discretes ainsi que les donne la sensa- 
tion, ils wen sont pas moins justes et valables et embrassent les choses réelles, de sorte qu'il est 
vrat que les genres et les espéces subsistent, en ce sens qwils se rapportent ἃ des choses substs- 
tantes, car c’est par métaphore seulement que les philosophes ont pu dire que ces universaux sub- 
sistent; au sens propre ce serait dire qwils sont substances et Pon veut dire seulement que les 
objects qui donnent lieu aux universaux subsistent. In explanation of the very indefinite 
expression “ donner lieu,” we can, since Rémusat does not give here the words of Abelard, 
only fall back upon the above words concerning genres and espéces, that these “se rappor- 
tent ἃ des choses subsistantes.” The French historians are wont to designate this doctrine 
of Abelard’s as Conceptualism; yet Abelard by no means lays chief stress on the subject- 
ive concept as such, but on the word in its relation to the object denoted by it. The pith 
of his doctrine is contained in the sentence (Rémusat, II. p. 107): Est sERMo praedicabilis, 


a Pe = Ea οὐ ae oe 
a eae τ γῶς 


whet 





ἈΦ 


ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 393 


Only in an undeveloped form is Conceptualism contained in these words, in so far, namely, 
as the signification of each word is in the first instance the concept connected with it, which 
concept, however, itself has respect to the object denoted by the word (just as the logical 
judgment respects objective relations), whence Abelard distinguishes (Dial., p. 238 seq.) a 
significatio intellectualis and realis of all words and propositions; cf. Abelard’s affirmation 
(Diai., p. 496) that the Definitum is the word explained in respect of its meaning (not in 
respect of its essence—nihil est definitum, nisi declaratum secundum significationem voca- 
bulum). 

In regard to the question of objective existence Abelard expressly combats the (extreme 
realistical) theory that the universal has an independent existence before the individual. 
True, the species arise out of the genus by the addition of a form to the latter (Dial., p. 486: 
in constitutione speciei genus quod quasi materia ponitur, accepta differentia, quae quasi forma 
superadditur, in speciem transit); but this issuing of the species from the genus does not 
imply a priority of the latter in point of time or existence (Introd. ad Theolog., I. 13, 
Ῥ. 1083: quwm autem species ex genere creari seu gigni dicantur, non tamen ideo necesse est 
genus species suas tempore vel per existentiam praecedere, ut videlicet ipsum prius esse contigerit 
quam illas; numquam etenim genus nisi per aliquam speciem suam esse contingit, vel ullatenus 
animal fuit, antequam rationale vel irrationale fuerit, et ita species cum suis generibus simul 
naturaliter existunt, ut nullatenus genus sine illis, sicut nec ipsae sine genere esse potuerint). It 
were not impossible to detect in these deliverances the Aristotelian doctrine of the univer- 
sal in the individual (so, in particular, H. Ritter, Gesch. der Ph. VU. p. 418, judging 
especially from this passage, ascribes to Abelard the doctrine: wniversalia in re, non ante 
rem); but Abelard is far from expressing in principle this moderate form of Realism and 
developing it in systematic and logical form. For, holding that doctrine, he would have 
been obliged to declare the subjective sense of the word ‘‘wniversale” to be the meta- 
phorical one and to explain the expression, ‘‘that which can be predicated,” as meaning: 
‘‘that which is in such sense objective, that its concept (and the corresponding word) can 
be predicated.” On the contrary, Abelard (Dial., p. 458) expressly repels the realistic 
hypothesis (eam philosophicam sententiam, quae res ipsas, non tantwm voces, genera et species 
esse conjitetur). Still, it would be in vain to seek in Abelard’s works ἃ rigid solution of the 
problem in question, with which he occupied himself only incidentally and rather polemic- 
ally, than in the way of positive development. His merit consists here only in the for- 
tunate avoidance of certain untenable extremes. 


Notwithstanding his opposition to the theory of the independent existence of the uni- | 


versal, Abelard finds means to support the doctrine of Plato, such as, from the statements | 


of Augustine, Macrobius, and Priscianus, he understands it to be. The Ideas, he says, | 


exist as the patterns of things, even before the creation of the latter, in the divine under- 


standing. Still, the remnant of substantiality which remained to the Ideas after the ἡ 


Plotinic transformation of the Platonic doctrine, became less and less in the specula- 
tions of the Christian thinkers, who were seeking, not to determine what was the real 
object of the Socratic concept, but to discover between God, the personal spirit, and 
the world, a connecting link, by which the creation of the latter might be explained; 
Abelard had already arrived at the conception of the Ideas as subjective conceptions 
of the divine mind (conceptus mentis, Theol. christ., I. p. 1191: non sine causa maximus 
Plato philosophorum prae ceteris commendatur ab omnibus, Ibid., IV. p. 1336: ad hune 
modum Plato formas exemplares in mente divina considerat, quas ideas appellat et ad quas 
postmodum quasi ad exemplar quoddam summi artificis providentia operata est. Introd. ad 


Theol., 1. Ὁ. 987: sic et Macrobius (Somn. Scip., 1. 2,14) Platonem insecutus mentem Det, quam 


Graecit Noyn appellant, originales rerum species quae ideae dictae sunt, continere meminit, ante- 


394 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


quam etiam, inquit Priscianus, in corpora prodirent, h. 6. in effecta operum provenirent. Ib, 
11. p. 1095 seq.: hanc autem processionem, qua scilicet conceptus mentis in effectum operando 
prodit, Priscianus in primo constructionum (Inst. Gramm., XVII. 44) diligenter aperit diceny 
generales et speciales formas rerum intelligibiliter in mente divina constitisse, antequam in cor- 
pora prodirent, h. 6. in effecta per operationem, quod est dicere: antea providit Deus quid 6 
qualiter ageret, quam illud impleret, ac si diceret: nihil impraemeditate sive indiscrete egit). Yn 
reference to the divine mind, therefore, Abelard inclines in reality to a form of Concep- 
- tualism, for the adherents of which there would, however, no longer remain any logical 
motive for limiting the Ideas to universals, since God thinks also the particular. This con- 
sequence was soon deduced by Bernard of Chartres (below, p. 397). 

Abelard holds, with Augustine, that of all the ancient philosophers the Platonists 
taught the doctrine most consonant with Christian faith, their One or Good, the Nous with 
the ideas, and the world-soul, being interpreted as referring to the three persons of the 
Trinity: God the Father, the Logos, and the Holy Ghost. Abelard’s explanation of the 
world-soul as representing the Holy Ghost gave offence, and was one of the points in the 
accusation of Bernard of Clairvaux against him. In his Dialectic Abelard industriously 
gives prominence to the points of difference between the Platonic doctrine and the Catho- 
lic, and in particular to the fact that the soul of the world is represented as coming forth 
from the Nous in time, whereas the Holy Ghost proceeds eternally from the Father and 
the Son, and only his working in the world has had a temporal beginning, namely, with 
the world itself. The passage in the Dialectic appears like a recantation, for which reason 
Cousin (Ouv. inéd. ὦ Abél., Introd, p. XXXV.) not without reason concludes that this 
work was composed after the Council of Sens (1140). 

If, as Nominalism or Individualism logically implies, three divine persons are three 
Gods, then one God is one divine person. Abelard, who did not quit the nominalistic 
stand-point as such (notwithstanding the modifications by which he brought it nearer to 
Conceptualism), but decidedly rejected the Tritheism of Roscellinus, verged by his doctrine 
toward Monarchianism (which reduces the three persons to three attributes of God), al- 
though he did not confess this consequence. Otto of Freising, a pupil of Gilbertus Porre- 
tanus, while showing how the theological position of Abelard resulted from the Nominalism 
which he had imbibed from Roscellinus, his first teacher, says (De Gestis Frid., 1. 47) that 
Abelard compared the unity in essence of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to the unity in the 
Syllogism of the three parts of the Syllogism (sententiam ergo vocum seu nominum tn naturali 
tenens facultate non caute theologiae admiscuit, quare de sancta Trinitate docens et scribens tres 
personas nimium attenuans non bonis usus exemplis inter cetera dixit: sicut eadem oratio est 
propositio, assumptio et conclusio, ita eadem essentia est pater et filius et spiritus sanctus). This 
comparison is employed by Abelard in the Introd. ad Theol., 11. p. 1078; it was probably 
suggested by August. de Vera Rel., 13, see above, p. 342; but the introduction of the Syllo- 
gism into the comparison is the work of Abelard. He often employs, besides, the almost 
Monarchianistic comparisons of Augustine, the opponent of the generic interpretation of the 
Trinity. 

The question whether God can do more than he really does is decided by Abelard to 
the effect that it can only be answered in the affirmative, when abstract reference is had 
to the divine power alone; but that when the unity of the divine power and wisdom is 
considered, it must be answered in the negative (Th. Chr., p. 1353 seq.; Epist. Th., ed. 
Rheinw., p. 53 seq.). 

In his presentation of the doctrines of the Church, the chief merit of Abelard consists in 
his endeavor to maintain a certain independence with regard to patristic authority. In the 
bold work “Sic et Non,” he makes the authorities neutralize each other by placing side by 








. > 
ix 
“a 


ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 9595 


side their mutually contradictory assertions. Abelard gives indeed rules whereby the con- 
tradictions may for the most part be recognized as only apparent, or due to the evil designs 
of forgers or to the inaccuracy of copyists; yet enough of them are left standing to force 
assent to the proposition that only what is contained in the canonical Scriptures is without 
exception and unconditionally true, and that no one of the Church Fathers may be regarded 
as of equal authority with the Apostles. Our duty is to investigate, and for investigation, 
according to Aristotle, doubt prepares the way (Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem venimus, 
inquirendo veritatem percipimus, Prol., ap. Cousin, p. 16). Where a strict demonstration 
cannot be given, the moral consciousness must be our guide (Introd. ad Th., III. p. 119: 
magis autem honestis quam necessariis rationibus utimur, quoniam apud bonos id semper prin- 
cipium statuitur, quod ex honestate amplius commendatur). 

Not inconsiderable is Abelard’s merit in Ethics, especially on account of his development 
of the doctrine of conscience, by emphasizing the subjective aspect. He regards Christian 
ethics as a reformation of the natural law of morals (Theol. Christ., Il. p. 1211: st enim 
diligenter moralia evangelit praecepta consideremus, nihil ea aliud quam reformationem legis 
naturalis inveniemus, quam secutos esse philosophos constat). The philosophers, like the Evan- 
gelists, represent the intention (animi intentio) as the criterion of morality. They rightly 
teach that the good hate sin from love of virtue, and not from a slavish fear of punishment 
(ib., p. 1205). The business of Ethics is, according to Abelard, to point out the highest 
good, as the aim of human endeavor, and to show the way to the same (Dialog. inter philos., 
Jud. et Chr., p. 669). The absolutely highest good is God: the highest good for man is 
love to God, which makes him well-pleasing to God, and the greatest evil is to hate God, 
whereby man becomes displeasing to God (ib., p. 694 seq.). The way which leads to the 
highest good is virtue, 7. ¢., a will of which goodness has become a confirmed quality (#., 
Ρ. 669 seq.; 7b., 675: bona in habitum solidata voluntas). The “habitus” of virtue makes 
one inclined to good actions, just as the opposite habitus inclines one to evil actions (Eth., 
Prol., p. 594). Yet it is not in the action, but in the intention, that moral good and evil 
reside. Jn the broader sense, it is true, the word fault (peccatum) denotes any deviation 
from the fitting (quaecunque non convenienter facimus, Eth., ch. 15), even when uninten- 
tional, but in its narrower signification it denotes only a voluntary error. Actions as such 
are indifferent. Nor is the propensity to evil, which belongs to us in consequence of 
original sin, 6. g., the merely natural inclination to anger or sensuality arising from the 
disposition of the body, in itself sin. It is only the consenting to evil which is sin, and 
that because it implies a culpable contempt of God (Eth., ch. 3: non enim quae fiant, sed quo 
animo fiant, pensat Deus, nec in opere, sed in intentione meritum operantis vel laus consistit. 
Ib., ch. 7: opera omnia in se indifferentia nec nisi pro intentione agentis vel bona vel mala 
dicenda sunt, non videlicet quia bonum vel malum sit ea fiert, sed quia bene vel male fiunt, hoc 
est ex intentione qua convenit fiert aut minime. Ib., ch. 3: hune vero consensum proprie pecca- 
tum nominamus, hoc est culpam animae, qua damnationem meretur vel apud Deum rea sta- 
tuitur. Quid est enim iste consensus nisi contemtus Dei et offensio ipsius? Non enim Deus ex 
damno, sed ex contemtu offendi potest). Abelard gives special prominence to the conception 
of conscience (conscientia), or the individual moral consciousness of the acting subject, as 
opposed to the objective norms of morality. The idea of sin, he affirms, implies not only a 
departure from what is morally good in itself, but at the same time a violence done to the 
sinner’s owr moral consciousness; whatever, therefore, is not in conflict with this con- 
sciousness is not sin, although that which harmonizes with one’s own moral consciousness 
is not for that reason virtue, unless this consciousness is what it ought to be. The coin- 
cidence of the objective norms with the subjective consciousness is the condition of virtue 
in the most complete sense, which consists in a direction of the will in accordance with 


396 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


these guides; and the same coincidence is the condition of sin in the most complete sense, 
as being a direction of the will in opposition to the same guides. If, however, the subject- 
ive moral conviction of a person is erroneous, then the corresponding acts of will and 
performance are, not indeed good, but faulty, though less faulty than would be a course of 
action in accordance with the objective norms, but opposed to the conscience of the agent 
(Eth., ch. 13: non est peccatum nisi contra conscientiam. 10., ch. 13: non es: ttaque intentio 
bona dicenda quia bona videtur, sed insuper quia talis est sicut existimatur quum videlicet illud 
ad quod tendit, si Deo placere credit, in hac insuper existimatione sua nequaquam fallatur. Ib., 
ch. 14: sic et illos qui persequantur Christum vel suos, quos persequendos credebant, per opera- 
tionem peccasse dicimus, qui tamen gravius culpam peccassent, si contra conscientiam eis 
parcerent). Sin, in the proper and strict sense of the word, as the consenting to known evil 
and contempt of God, is avoidable, although on account of the sinful propensities, against 
which we are obliged to combat, it cannot be avoided without great difficulty (/b., ch. 15: st 
autem proprie peccatum intelligentes solum Dei contemtum dicamus peccatum, potest revera sine 
hoc vita transigi, quamvis cum maxima difficultate). 

The rationalistic tendency of Abelard was complained of by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 
who affirmed that he ‘‘savored of Arius when he spoke of the Trinity ” (referring to the com- 
parison of the Father and the Son to the genus and the species; others of his comparisons 
are more Sabellian in spirit), ‘‘of Pelagius when he spoke of grace, and of Nestorius 
when he spoke of the person of Christ” (Epist. ad Guidonem de Castello). St. Bernard said 
further, that ‘while he labored to prove Plato a Christian, he showed himself a heathen” 
(Epist. ad papam Innocentium). But although Abelard was compelled to recall those parts 
of his teachings which were in conflict with the doctrine of the Church, his influence on 
his contemporaries and on following generations was great and lasting. By Anselm and 
Abelard the dialectical form was ineffaceably impressed on the theology of the Middle 
Ages. 

An anonymous Commentary to the De Interpretatione, from which Cousin (fragmens 
Philos., Phil. Scol.) has published some extracts, belongs to the school of Abelard; in it 
logic is defined as doctrina sermonum, and, in accordance with the plan followed by Abelard 
himself in his Dialectica, is divided into doctrina incomplexorum, propositionum et syllogis- 
morum. - Farther removed from Abelard’s doctrine are the contents of the treatise De Jn- 
tellectibus, which Cousin (Fragm. Philos., 2d ed., Paris, 1840, pp. 461-496) has published as 
a work of Abelard, and in which the concepts (intellectus), which the author calls also specu- 
lationes or visus animi, are explained and distinguished from sensus, imaginatio, existimatio, 
scientia, and ratio. Aristotle’s Anal. Poster. must at least in parts have been known to the 
author, and that in another translation than the Boéthian, since in the latter δόξα is trans- 
lated by opinatio, and not by existimatio (see Prantl, Gesch. der Log., II. pp. 104, 206). The 
concept is derived by abstraction from the perceptions of the senses, and in it we think a 
form without regard to its substratum (subjecta materia), or an undifferentiated essence, 
with no distinction of individuals (naturam quamlibet indifferenter absque suorum scilicet 
individuorum discretione). The manner in which we here regard the object of the concept 
is different from that in which the object itself subsists, since in reality the indifferens only 
exists in the midst of individual plurality, and not unmixed and by itself, as in thought 
(nusquam enim ita pure subsistit, sicut pure concipitur, et nulla est natura, quae indifferenter 
subsistat). This, however, does not render the concept false ; for it could only be such in 
case I conceived the object as being different from what it really is, but not when only the 
modus attendendi intellectus and the modus subsistendi of the res are distinguished from one 
another. 

The treatise to which Cousin has given the title: De Generibus et Speciebus (publishing 






A SE ae ες «ον = 


shi: 2 





κε 


ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 997 


it from a MS. of St. Germain as a work of Abelard’s in Ouvr. Inéd. d’Ab., pp. 507-550), is, 
as was rightly perceived by H. Ritter (Gesch. der Philos., VII. p. 363, οἵ. Prantl, Il. p. 143 
seq.), of a style and of contents such as preclude our attributing it to Abelard; but Ritter’s 
conjecture that Joscellin (or Gauslenus)—who was Bishop of Soissons from 1122 to 1151, 
and of whom we know, through John of Salisbury (Metalog., II. 17, p. 92), that he “universali- 
tatem rebus in unum collectis attribuit et singulis eandem demit”—or one of his pupils was the 
author, is also uncertain. In this work several doctrines relating to the subject of the con- 
troversy between Nominalism and Realism are cited and discussed in an erudite and acute 
manner, all of which doctrines belong indeed to the first half of the twelfth century, but 
searcely all of them to the time of Abelard’s youth (when Cousin believes the work to have 
been written). In distinction from Abelard, the author of this work, who indeed employs in 
part the arguments of Abelard (p. 514), confesses his adhesion to a moderate form of Realism, 
by which the universal is represented as not immanent in the single individual as such, but 
in the totality of similar individuals. Abelard (see above, p. 392) had founded his Nominal- 
istic conception of universals on the Aristotelian definition of the universal as that whose 
nature it is to be predicated of several objects, by combining with this definition his doc- 
trine that not things, but only words can be predicated (or, res de re non praedicatur). But 
the author of the treatise now in question escapes this nominalistic consequence of the 
above definition by taking “predicated” in the sense of “principally signified by the 
predicated word” (principaliter significari per vocem praedicatam, Cousin, p. 531); but that 
which is signified is always something objective, and in the case of the names of species, 
that which is signified principaliter is the totality of similar individuals. (The author illus- 
trates the difference between principaliter significare and secondary meanings by a reference 
to the Aristotelian employment of white as an example of quality—reminding us thus of 
Anselm’s dialogue De Grammatico.) Accordingly the author defines (p. 524 seq.) the species 
as not that human essence, which is in Socrates or any other individual alone, but as the 
collected essence of all individuals of the same nature; the species is thus essentially plural, 
though one in name, just as a nation is called one, though consisting of many persons 
(speciem dico esse non iillam essentiam hominis solum, quae est in Socrate vel quae est in aliquo 
alio individuorum, sed totam illam collectionem ex singulis alits hujus naturae conjunctam, quae 
tota collectio, quamvis essentialiter multa sit, ab auctoritatibus tamen una species, unum universale, 
una, natura appellatur, sicut populus quamvis ex multis personis collectus sit, unus dicitur). The 
individual is not identical with the universal, but when the universal is affirmed of the 
individual (6. g., Socrates est homo), the meaning is that the former inheres in the latter 
(p. 533: omnis natura, quae pluribus inhaeret individuis materialiter, species est). The usual 
denomination of the genus as the materia, and of the substantialis differentia as the forma, 
by the addition of which it becomes a species, is also found here (p. 516 e¢ al.). The matter 
of the individual is its species and its individuality is its form (p. 524: unwmguodque indi- 
viduum ex materia et forma compositum est, ut Socrates ex homine materia et Socratitate forma, 
sic Plato ex simili materia, sc. homine, et forma diversa, sc. Platonitate, componitur, sic et sin- 
guli homines ; et sicut Socratitas, quae formaliter constituit Socratem, nusquam est extra Socratem, 
sic illa hominis essentia, quae Socratitatem sustinet in Socrate, nusquam est nisi in Socrate). 
Bernard of Chartres (born about 1070-1080), William of Conches, and Adelard of 
Bath, who all taught in the first half of the twelfth century, grounded their teachings on 
Plato, but endeavored, in order not to come in conflict with the authority of Aristotle, to 
combine the opinions of both those thinkers. We stand, says Bernard of himself and his 
contemporaries, in comparison with the ancients, like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. 
On the authority of the Platonic Timaeus (in the translation of Chalcidius) and of the 
Augustinian reports concerning Platonism, or rather concerning Neo-Platonism, Bernard 


398 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY 


supposes matter (hyle) to have been reduced to orderly shape by the world-soul, and that 
the world-soul issued from the divine reason in which the Ideas were contained, and which 
was itself the Logos of God the Father, the suprema divinitas, called also by Bernhard 
Tagaton. The Ideas or formae exemplares, which remain unchanged amid all the change 
of individual objects and are the original grounds of all things, exist as eternal concepts 
of genera, species, and also of individuals in the divine reason (Bern., Megacosm., ap. 
Cousin, Oewvr. Inéd. αἰ Abélard, p. 628: Noys swummi et exsuperantissimi Dei est intellectus et 
ex ejus divinitate nata natura, in qua vitae viventis imagines, notiones aeternae, mundus intel- 
ligibilis, rerum cognitio praefinita. rat igitur videre velut in speculo tersiore quidquid operi 
Dei secretior destinaret affectus. Illic in genere, in specie, in individuali singularitate con- 
seripta quidquid yle, quidquid mundus, quidquid parturiunt elementa. Illic exarata supremi 
digito dispunctoris textus temporis, fatalis series, dispositio saeculorum ; illic lacrymae pauperum 
Jortunaque regum, etc.). The soul [of the world] is an Endelychia (ἐντελέχεια of Aristotle) 
which issued, as if by emanation (velut emanatione defiuxit), from the divine mind. This 
soul (p. 631) then gave shape to nature (natwram informavit). William of Conches, who 
discusses particular physiological and psychological problems, avows, in those cases in 
which Platonism diverges from the Christian doctrine, his adhesion to the latter (Chris- 
tianus swm, non academicus, ap. Cousin, Oewvr. Inéd. d’Ab., p. 673), especially in reference to 
the question of the origin of souls (cwm Augustino credo et sentio quotidie novas animas non ex 
traduce [which opinion Augustine had, however, not unconditionally rejected], non ex aliqua 
substantia, sed ex nihilo, solo jussu creatoris creari). Little as William of Conches is disposed 
to accept the authority of the Church Fathers in matters of physics (‘“ etsi enim majores nobis, 
homines tamen,” etc.), he yet submits to it unconditionally in spiritual matters (‘in eis, quae 
ad fidem cath. vel ad institutionem morum pertinet, non est fas Bedae vel alicui alii sanctorum 
patrum contradicere”). In what manner the theory of ideas was reconciled with the Aris- 
totelian doctrine is shown by the work (composed about 1115) of Adelard of Bath, who 
distinguished himself through his extensive knowledge of natural history, acquired on long 
journeys, especially among the Arabians, and who translated Euclid from the Arabic (ef. 
Sprenger, Mohammad, Vol. I., Berlin, 1861, p. 11). He says (ap. Hauréau, Ph. Sc., I. 
p. 225 seq.) that Aristotle was right in teaching that genera and species were immanent in 
individuals, in so far as it is true that the objects of sensation are, according to the 
manner in which they are considered—~. e., according as we pay attention to their indi- 
vidual existence or to that in which they resemble each other—individuals or species or 
genera, but that Plato was also right in teaching that they only exist in complete purity 
apart from things, ὦ. e., in the divine mind. 

Walter of Mortaigne (died in 1174 while Bishop of Laon), is mentioned by John of 
Salisbury as the chief representative of the doctrine that the same objects, according to the 
different condition (status) in which they are considered—z. 6., according as our attention is 
directed to their differences or to their likeness, to the indifferens or the consimile in them— 
are either individuals or species or genera (J/etalog., 11. 17: partiwntur igitur status duce Gau- 
tero de Mauretania, et Platonem in eo quod Plato est, dicunt individuwm, in eo quod homo, speciem, 
in 60 quod animal, genus, sed subalternum, in eo quod substantia, generalissimum). This doctrine 
is spoken of by the same author as no longer maintained by any one in his time. Abelard 
(in the Glossulae super Porphyriwm, ap. Rémusat, Ab., 11. p. 99 seq.; probably arguing 
against Adelard of Bath), and, from a different point of view, the author of the work De 
Generibus et Speciebus (Cousin, Oeuvr. Inéd. dAb., p. 518) had opposed it. 

Gilbert de la Porrée (Gilbertus Porretanus, called also Pictaviensis, from Poitier, his 
native place), a pupil of Bernard of Chartres and others, advanced, in connection with the 
Boéthian rendering of Aristotle’s definition of the universal (quod natwm est de pluribus prae- 








ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 399 


dicari), the doctrine of “native forms” (which John of Salisbury thus sums up: univer- 
salitatem formis nativis attribuit et in earum conformitate laborat; est autem forma nativa 
originalis exemplum et quae non in mente Dei consistit, sed rebus creatis inhaeret, haec graeco 
eloquio dicitur eidoc, habens se ad ideam ut exemplum ad exemplar, sensibilis quidem in re sensi- 
bili, sed mente concipitur insensibilis, singularis quoque in singulis, sed in omnibus universalis). 
In his commentary to (Pseudo-) Boéthius de Trinitate (Op. Boéth., ed. Basil., 1570, p. 1152), 
Gilbert distinguishes two significations of the word substance: 1) quod est, sive subsistens, 
2) quo est, sive subsistentia.* Genera and species are generic and specific subsistences, but 
not objects existing substantially (non substant vere, p. 1139); subsisting things constitute 
the being of their subsistences (res subsistentes sunt esse subsistentiarum), while the subsist- 
ences are substantial forms (formae substantiales, Ὁ. 1255 seq.). There are generic and 
specific, and also singular subsistences, which latter exist always in only one individual; 
individuals are distinguished from each other not only by accidental, but, also, by substan- 
tial properties (p. 1128). The intellect (intellectus) collects (colligit) the universal, which 
exists, but not as a substance (est, sed non substat), from the particular things which not 
merely are (sunt) but also (as subjects of accidents) have substantial existence (substant, 
p. 1138 seq.), by considering only their substantial similarity or conformity (p. 1135 seq.; 
1252). In sensible or natural things form and matter are united; the forms do not exist 
as “native forms” apart from things (inabstracte), but with them (concretae); the mind can 
by abstraction (abstractim) attend to them (attendere); for things are often conceived (con- 
cipiuntur) not in the way in which they are, but in another way (p. 1138). In God, who is 
pure form without matter, the archetypes of material things (corporum exemplaria, p. 1138) 
exist as eternal, immaterial forms. No one of the categories (as Gilbert teaches, with 
Augustine and others) can be applied in its literal sense to God (p. 1154); theological 
speculation, which relates to the immaterial, to that which exists abstractly, cannot con- 
form altogether to the laws of natural, concrete things (p. 1140; 1173). In his theological 
speculations Gilbert caused scandal by teaching that the one God in three persons was the 
one deitas or divinitas, the one form in God by which God is God, and from which the three 
persons derive their form (forma in Deo, qua Deus sit, the forma, qua tres personae infor- 
mentur). The subject was especially discussed at the Council at Rheims in 1148. Saint 
Bernard condemned the distinction between Deus and Divinitas.—The work of Gilbert, De 
Sex Principiis, treats of the last six categories of Aristotle: actio, passio, ubi, quando, situs, 
habere. Numerous commentaries on it were written by later Scholastics. According to 
Gilbert, quantity, quality, and relation (in proprio statu) are inherent (formae inhaerentes) in 
the category of substance, while the last six categories are only (respectu alterius) assistant 
forms (formae assistentes) in connection with the same category. The validity of this 
distinction is quite questionable, especially when relatio is reckoned among the inherent 
forms, for relation is impossible without a reference to a second object, and it is in just this 
reference that it consists ; Gilbert regarded it as sufficient that the possibility in general of 
being related to something else should exist in the object itself. In this Albertus Magnus 
agreed with him; but the later Scholastics recognized only substance, quantity, and quality 
as absolute categories, and ascribed to the seven others a relative character, just as Leib- 
nitz also recognized as ‘“déterminations internes” only “Vessence, la qualité, la quantité” 
(reducing, however, the ten categories of Aristotle to five, viz.: substance, quantity, 
quality, action and passion, and relation). 
Petrus Lombardus (of Lumelogno, near Novara, in Lombardy, and who died in 1164, / 


* [Since forms have no accidents, it cannot be said that they swhstant, or are substances. but since 


they, nevertheless, swbsistwnt, they are termed sudsistentiae {or subsistences].” Erdmann, Grundriss 
der Gesch. der Philos., § 163. 8.--- 7). 


400 ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 


while Bishop of Paris) collected in his four books of Sentences various sayings of the 
Church Fathers concerning ecclesiastical dogmas and problems, but was not uninfluenced 
in his exposition of them by Abelard’s Ste et Non and the Summa Sententiarum of Hugo 
of St. Victor. Petrus Lombardus treats, in the first book, of God as the absolute good 
(quo fruimur), in the second of creatures (quibus utimur), in the third of the incarnation 
(which Hugo had considered in connection with the doctrine of God and the Trinity in his 
first book) and of redemption and of the virtues, and in the fourth of the seven sacra- 
ments, as the signs (stgna) by which salvation is communicated, and of the end of the 
world. His work became and for centuries continued in the schools to be the principal 
_ basis of theological instruction. It was imitated by some, and commented on by very 
many. In the dialectical treatment of theological questions his Sentences were, as a rule, 
_ made the point of departure. Similar works were prepared by Robert Pulleyn (died at 
Rome in 1150; from his work: Sententiarum libri octo, Petrus Lombardus borrowed much), 
Robert of Melun, Hugo of Amiens, and Peter of Poitiers, a pupil of Peter the Lombard. 

The orthodox Mystics of the twelfth century, such as Abelard’s opponent, Bernard of 
Clairvaux (1091-1153)—who valued knowledge only in so far as it ministered to edification, 
and held that to seek for knowledge on its own account was heathenish—Hugo of St. 
Victor (1097-1141)—a man of encyclopedical erudition, who laid down the principle, 
that the ‘‘uncorrupted truth of things cannot be discovered by reasoning ”—and his dis- 
ciple, Richard of St. Victor (died in 1173)—who treated the faculty of mystical contem- 
plation as superior to ¢maginatio and ratio—contributed to the elaboration of ecclesiastical 
doctrine; but, inasmuch as they really made the images of the fancy of more account than 
the conceptions of the reason, they occupied a position so foreign and hostile to philosophy, 
that it was impossible that they should contribute materially to the advancement of the 
latter. Walter of St. Victor, a monastic Prior, gave (according to Buleeus, Hist. Univ. 
Par., 1. p. 404, and Launoy, De var. Arist. fort., ch. 3), in about the year 1180, to Abelard, 
Petrus Lombardus, Gilbert and Peter of Poitiers, the name of the “four labyrinths of 
France,” affirming that all of them, ‘‘inspired with the Aristotelian spirit, had treated witk 
scholastic levity of the ineffable Trinity and the Incarnation.” 

John, of Salisbury in the south of England (Johannes Saresberiensis), was born about 
1110-20, and educated in France in the years 1136-1148. In the latter year he returned 
to England. He was a friend of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, and of Thomas 
Becket, and from 1176 till his death in 1180 was Bishop of Chartres. He was a pupil 
of Abelard, of Alberich, the anti-nominalistic logician, of Robert of Melun, of William of 
Conches, and Gilbert de la Porrée, and also of Robert Pulleyn the theologian, and others. 
Like Abelard and Bernard of Chartres, but to a still greater extent than they, he combined 
with the study of logic and theology the study of classical authors. He composed in 
1159-1160, about twenty years after the time when he had pursued his studies in logic, his 
two principal works, the Policraticus, 7. e., the overcoming of the inanities (nugae) of the court 
by the spirit of ecclesiastical philosophy, and the Afetalogicus, on the value of logic, in which 
he undertook the defense of that discipline (logicae suscepit patrocinium, Prol., p. 8. ed. Giles). 
The Metalogicus is full of information concerning the manner in which logic was cultivated 
by the Scholastics of John’s time. John mentions in the Metalogicus (II. 17) eight different 
opinions (the eighth, according to which the species are ‘‘ maneries,” or manieéres, is akin to 
the seventh, according to which they are formed by the act of colligere), and among them, 
as the third in order (after the doctrines of Roscellinus and Abelard), the conceptualistic 
(which he thus expresses: alius versatur in intellectibus et eos duntaxat genera dicet esse et 
spectes; swmunt enim occasionem a Cicerone et Boéthio, qui Aristotelem laudant auctorem quod 
haec credi et dict debeant notiones [Cicero appeals only to the authority of “ Graeci,” by whom 





“AS 


ABELARD AND OTHER SCHOLASTICS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 401 


the Stoics are to be understood]; est autem, ut ajunt, notio ex ante percepta forma cujusque 
rei cognitio enodatione indigens, et alibi: notio est quidam wntellectus et simplex animi conceptio ; 
co ergo deflectitur quidquid scriptum est, ut intellectus aut notio universalivm universalitatem 
claudat). John does not avow an unconditional acceptance of either of these doctrines, but 
shows himself everywhere most favorably inclined to the doctrine of Gilbert; he conceives 
the universalia to be essential qualities or forms, immanent in things and separated from 
them only by abstraction, and he contests the hypothesis of independent Ideas existing 
apart from God. For the rest, in reference to this question he for the most part expresses 
himself as in doubt (Metal., II. 20: qui me in his quae sunt dubitabilia sapienti, academicum esse 
pridem professus sum). He holds it to be unfitting to spend too much time on problems of 
this kind or to devote all one’s life to them alone, and charges even Aristotle with subtilizing 
(argutias, Policr., 111. 3; VII. 12 et al.); Aristotle, he says, was more convincing in his argu- 
ments against the opinions of others than in the demonstration of his own, and was by no 
means infallible and, as it were, ‘‘sacrosanctus” (Metal., 111. 8; IV. 27). John had too 
often seen how, in the defense of an opinion, all other passages from the authorities were 
violently accommodated to the one passage from which the opinion in question had been 
derived, not to feel scandalized by a mode of interpretation which permitted such proce- 
dures. He therefore demands that heed be paid to the changes in the use of words, and 
that perfect uniformity in expression be not always expected. He also admits the real 
difference in opinion and even the errors of the ancient masters, without, however, com- 
prehending their differences as phases of the development of philosophic thought. In 
opposition to the fruitless contentions of the schools, John lays great weight on the ‘‘wtile,”’ 
and especially on whatever furthers moral progress. All virtue, even that of the heathen, 
is derived from divine illumination and grace (Policrat., III. 9). The perfect will is in 
God’s sight equal to the act; yet works furnish that evidence which God requires of our 
perfect will (Policr., V. 3: probatio dilectionis exhibitio operis est). John’s practical stand- 
point is that of rigid ecclesiasticism. 

Alanus (‘ab Insulis”) (died a monk at Clairvaux, about 1203) wrote in five books, De 
Arte sive de Articulis Fidei Catholicae, in which he sought to confirm the principal doc- 
trines of the Christian Church by rational grounds. Setting out from general propositions 
in regard to causation (such as guidquid est causa causae, est etiam causa causati; omnis causa 
subjecti est etiam causa accidentis [nam accidens habet esse per subjectum]; nihil semet ipsum 
composuit vel ad esse produait [nequit enim aliquid esse prius semet ipso], etc.), he presents, 
following essentially the order of the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, in the first book the 
doctrine of God, the One and Triune, the sole cause of all things; in the second, the 
doctrine of the world, the creation of angels and men, and free-will; in the third, the doc- 
trine of the restoration (reparatio) of fallen man; in the fourth, the doctrine of the sacra- 
ments of the Church; and in the fifth, the doctrine of the resurrection and the future life. 
Alanus had known the book on Causes (Liber de Causis), which is founded on Neo-Platonie 
theses and came to the Scholastics through the Jews. 

Amalrich, of Bena in the district of Chartres (died while teaching theology at Paris, 
in 1206 or 1207), and his followers, among whom David of Dinant was the most distin- 
guished, philosophized in a sense somewhat opposed to the teaching of the Church and ap- 
proaching to Pantheism. Their doctrines were condemned in the beginning of the thirteenth 
century, at the Synod of Paris in 1209, and at the Lateran Council called by Pope Innocent 
III., in 1215, and their writings, as also the work of Erigena and the Physics of Aristotle, 
and afterward also the Aristotelian Metaphysics, which seemed to favor their doctrines, were 
forbidden to be read (cf. below, 8. 98). Amalrich taught (according to Gerson, De Con- 
cordia Metuph. cum Log.. IV.) the identity in some sense of the Creator with the creation. 

26 


409 GREEK AND SYRIAN PHILOSOPHERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 


God was the one essence of all creatures. The Ideas possessed creative power, although 
they were themselves created, All that was divisible and changeable would return finally 
into God. David of Dinant composed a book entitled De Tomis (i. e., de divisionibus), in 
which he sought to demonstrate that God and the original matter of the universe and the 
Nous were identical, since they all corresponded with the highest (most abstract) concept 
which can be formed; if they were diverse, there must exist above them some higher and 
common element or being, in which they agreed, and then this would be God and Nous 
and the original matter (Albert. M., Summa Th., I. 4. 20). The principal sources from 
which this extreme Realism was derived, were (in addition to the Albigensian heresy, 
which was founded on Manicheism and Paulicianism) the works of John Scotus and 
Dionysius Areopagita; but at least David of Dinant, and probably Amalrich also, had 
made use of the Metaphysics and Physics of Aristotle—on which, together with his Ethics, 
from this time forward the development of Scholasticism depended—and David of Dinant 
had very probably made use of the ‘‘ Fons Vitae” of Avicebron (bn Gebirol, see below, 


89. : ΝΣ : 


( 
ς 


2 


§ 95. The causes which led to the transformation of the Scholastic 
philosophy after the end of the twelfth century and its development 
into the highest perfection attaimable for it, were that acquaintance 
with all the works of Aristotle, for which the Scholastic philosophers 
were indebted to the Arabians, the Jews, and, at a later time, to the 
Greeks, as also their acquaintance with the philosophy of those men 
by whom Aristotle was thus made known to them. Among the 
Greek Christians, after the suppression of Neo-Platonism by the 
decree of Justinian (529), and when the heterodox influence of this 
philosophy on Christian theologians (as illustrated by Origen and his 
pupils) had been brought to an end, the Aristotelian philosophy gained 
constantly in authority, the Aristotelian dialectic, which was first 
employed only by hereties, being finally employed also by the ortho- 
dox in their theological controversies. The school of the Syrian Nes- 
torians at Edessa (afterward at Nisibis) and the medico-philosophical 
school at Gandisapora were principal seats of Aristotelian studies ; 
through them the Aristotelian philosophy was communicated to the 
Arabians. The Syrian Monophysites also participated in the study 
of Aristotle, especially in the schools at Resaina and Kinnesrin. 
Johannes Philoponus, a Monophysite and Tritheist, and Johannes 
Damascenus, an orthodox monk, were Christian Aristotelians, the 
latter of whom, in scholastic fashion, employed the logic and meta- 
physics of Aristotle as aids to the systematic presentation of the 
strictly orthodox faith. In the eighth and ninth centuries all studies 
were on the decline in the Orient; yet the tradition of them was pre- 
served. In the eleventh century Michael Psellus and Johannes 


or 





en 


GREEK AND SYRIAN PHILOSOPHERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 403 


Italus distinguished themselves especially as logicians. From the 
centuries next following several commentaries on works of Aristotle 
and some minor works on other philosophers have been preserved. 
In the fifteenth century the Greeks, particularly after the taking of 
Constantinople by the Turks in the year 1453, brought to the nations 
of the West that increased knowledge of ancient literature which, in 
the department of philosophy, gave rise to the struggle between Aris- 
totelian Scholasticism and the newly-arising Platonism. 


The philosophy of the Greeks in the Middle Ages is discussed by Jac. Brucker (//ist. crit. philos., Vol. 
III., Leipsic, 1748, pp. 582-554), and, in later times, with special reference to logic, by Carl Prantl (@esch. 
der Logik, 1., p. 643 seq., and II., pp. 261-296). E. Rénan (Paris, 1852) has written of the Peripatetic philoso- 
phy among the Syrians. Cf. G. Hoffmann, De hermeneuticis apud Syros Aristotelcis (Diss. Inaug.). 
Berlin, 1868. 


The Aristotelian logic was already regarded to a certain extent as an authority in the 
school of Origen. Gregory of Nazianzen wrote an abridgment of the Organon (see Prantl, 
Gesch. ἃ. L., 1. p. 657). But at first the Aristotelian philosophy was studied more by here- 
tics than by Orthodox Christians. The Platonic doctrines were more allied to those of 
Christianity and were more highly esteemed, yet in proportion as theology became a scho- 
lastie science the Aristotelian logic was more highly prized as an organon. 

Together with Nestorianism, Aristotelianism found acceptance in the fifth century among 
that part of the Syrians who dwelt in the East, and especially in the school at Edessa. 
The oldest document of this philosophy among the Syrians is a commentary on Arist. de 
Interpr., by Probus, a contemporary of Ibas, who was Bishop of Edessa, and translated the 
commentaries of Theodorus of Mopsueste on certain books of the Bible. The same Probus 
wrote also commentaries on the Anal. Pri. and Soph. El. In 489 the school at Edessa was 
broken up by command of the Emperor Zeno, on account of the Nestorianism which pre- 
vailed in it, and the persons implicated fled to Persia and spread there, under the favor of 
the Sassanide, their religious and philosophical doctrines. Out of the remains of the 
school at Edessa arose the schools at Nisibis and Gandisapora, the latter being more par- 
ticularly devoted to medicine (Academia Hippocratica). King Chosroés of Persia took a 
lively interest in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Men educated in the school at 
Gandisapora became afterward teachers of the Arabs in medicine and philosophy. Later, 
but not with less zeal than the Nestorians, the Syrian Monophysites or Jacobites applied 
themselves to the study of Aristotle. At Resaina and Kinnesrin in Syria existed schools 
in which the Aristotelian philosophy was dominant. This study of Aristotle began in the 
sixth century with Sergius of Resaina, who translated Aristotle’s works into the Syriac 
language. In codices of the British Museum there exist by him (according to Rénan, De 
Philos. Perip. apud Syros, p. 25): Log. tractatus, Liber de causis universi juxta mentem Aris- 
totelis, quo demonstratur universum circulum efficere, and other works. Among the men 
educated at Kinnesrin, Jacob of Edessa, who translated theological and philosophical works 
from Greek into Syriac, deserves to be mentioned; his translation of the Categ. of Aristotle 
is still extant in MS. 

Concerning Johannes Grammaticus or Philoponus, see above, § 87, pp. 347, 349, and con- 
cerning Johannes Damascenus, 7)., pp. 347, 352. In the second half of the ninth century the 
Patriarch Photius distinguished himself by his comprehensive erudition; his Bibliotheca (ed. 
Bekker, Berlin, 1824) contains extracts from numerous philosophical works. His work 
on the Aristotelian Categories exists in MS. 


404 GREEK AND SYRIAN PHILOSOPHERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 


Michael Psellus (born A. D. 1020) wrote an Introduction to Philosophy (priuted Venice, 
1532, and Paris, 1541), a book on the opinions of the philosophers concerning the soul 
(Paris, 1618, etc.), and also commentaries on the Quinque Voces of Porphyry and Aristotle’s 
Categories (Venice, 1532; Paris, 1541) and Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (Venice, 1503).* 

A younger contemporary and rival of Psellus and his successor in the dignity of a 
ὕπατος φιλοσόφων was Johannes Italus, author of commentaries on the De Jnterpr. of Aris- 
totle and on the first four books of the Topica, and the author also of other logical works, 
which are preserved in MS. (see Prantl, Gesch. der Log., II. p. 294 seq.). A contemporary 
of Johannes Italus was Michael Ephesius, who, like Eustratius, Metropolitan of Nicaea 
in the twelfth century, and others, wrote a commentary on parts of the Organon of 
Aristotle. 

In the first half and about the middle of the thirteenth century lived Nicephorus Blem- 
mydes, author of an ᾿Βπιτομὴ λογικῆς (published by Thomas Wegelin, Augsburg, 1605), 
(The Greek voces memoriales for the syllogistic modes, with the exception of the Theo. 
phrastic modes, are found also in this ᾿Επετομῆ, although only written on the margin it 
the MSS., no mention being made of them in the text; they were, therefore, probably 
added by later hands, in imitation of the Latin words Barbara, ete.). An individual 
termed Georgius Aneponymus wrote likewise about the same time a compendium of the 
Aristotelian logic (printed at Augsburg in 1600). 


From the beginning of the fourteenth century a compendium of logic by Georgius 


* To him also is ascribed a compendium of Logic, bearing the title: Σύνοψις εἰς τὴν ᾿Αριστοτέλους 
λογικὴν ἐπιστήμην (edited by Elias Ehinger, Wittenberg, 1597), which reproduces in five sections the 
substance of the περὶ ἑρμηνείας of Aristotle, the Zsagoge of Porphyry, and the Categ., Anal. Priora and 
Topica of Arist. ; the Topica are given in the same form in which Boéthius gives them; they are followed, 
in chapters 25 and 26 of the fifth book, by a section on σημασία (significatio) and on ὑποθέσις (swppositio). 
A complete summary of the contents of this Synopsis is given by Prantl, Gesch. der Log., II, pp. 265-293, 
In this compendium are found the syllogistie mnemonic words, in which a denotes the universal affirma- 
tive judgment, ε the universal negative, c the particular affirmative, and o the particular negative judgment. 
The voces memoriales given for the four chief modes of the first figure, are γράμματα, ἔγραψε, γραφίδι, 
τεχνικός ; for the five Theophrastie modes of the same figure (out of which modes Galenus formed the fourth 
figure): γράμμασιν, ἔταξε, χάρισι, πάρθενος, ἱερόν ; for the four modes of the second figure: ἔγραψε, κάτεχε, 
μέτριον, ἄχολον ; for the six modes of the third figure: ἅπασι, σθεναρός, ἰσάκις, ἀσπίδι, ὁμαλός, φέριστος 
(cf. Prantl, Gesch. der Log., 11.. p. 275 seq.); the Latin logicians used instead the familiar words: Barbara, 
Celarent, Darii, Ferio, ete. The discussion of σημασία and ὑποθέσις, added to the last chapter of the 
Topica, forms a part of the doctrine which later Latin logicians were accustomed to present under the 
title “ De Terminorum Proprietatibus,” and to which they gave the name of Modern Logie (Tractatus 
Modernorwm), in distinction from the logie transmitted from ancient times (Logica Antiqua). Whether 
Psellus was really the author of this Ξύνοψις, is, however, very doubtful. In a manuscript of the work 
now at Munich (formerly at Augsburg), apparently of the fourteenth century, the following notice is added 
by a later hand: tod σοφωτάτου ψελλοῦ εἰς τὴν ᾿Αριστοτέλους λογικὴν ἐπιστήμην σύνοψις, and hence Ehinger 
edited the work as one of Michael Psellus. But in other manuscripts fhe work is called a translation of 
the logical compendium of Petrus Hispanus (see below, § 103), Georgius Scholarins (see below, Vol. IL. § 3) 
being named as the translator. The name of the translator is probably incorrectly given, for the Munich 
MS. is so old that it can scarcely have been translated from the Latin work, unless it were by an earlier trans- 
lator (say, Maximus Planndes, who lived about 1350). Prantl regards the Compendium of Petrus His- 
panus as a translation of the Synopsis of Psellus, while Val. Rose and Charles Thurot believe the Greek 
work to bea translation of the Latin one. If we adopt the latter theory, which the comparison of texts 
compels us to do, there still remains the question as to the origin of the new logical doctrines “ de termié- 
norum proprietatibus” (which arose in general from the blending of logic and grammar), which question 
needs, in regard to single points, to be answered more satisfactorily than it as yet has been. Cf. Prantl, 
Gesch. der Log., Ul. p. 288, and III. p. 18; also “ Michael Psellus und Petrus Hispanus, eine Rechtferti- 
gung, Leips. 1867,” and, on the other hand, Val. Rose, in the “ Hermes,” 11., 1867, p. 146 seq., and Charles 
Thurot, in the Revue archéologique, n. 8. X., Juillet ἃ Décembre, 1364, pp. 267-281, and Nos. 13 and 27 of 
the Revue Critique for 1867. 





ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 405 


Pachymeres has been preserved; it is entitled ᾿Επιτομὴ τῆς ᾿Αριστοτέλους λογικῆς (printed 
at Paris, 1548), and follows closely the Aristotelian Organon. In the fourteenth century 
Theodorus Metochita wrote paraphrases of the physiological and psychological works of 
Aristotle, and works on Plato and other philosophers (Fabric., Bibl. Gr., Vol. 1X.). In the 
period next succeeding, the study of Plato and Aristotle was pursued with zeal by the 
Greeks. 


§ 96. The whole philosophy of the Arabians was only a form of 
Aristotelianism, tempered more or less with Neo-Platonic conceptions. 
The medical and physical science of the Greeks and Greek philosophy 
became known to the Arabs especially under the rule of the A bassidee 
(from a. p. 750 on), when medical, and afterward (from the time of 
the reign of Almamum, in the first half of the ninth century) philo- 
sephical works were translated from Greek into Syriac and Arabic by 
Syriac Christians. The tradition of Greek philosophy was associated 
with that combination of Platonism and Aristotelianism which pre- 
vailed among the last philosophers of antiquity, and with the study 
by Christian theologians of the Aristotelian logic as a formal organon 
of dogmatics; but in view of the rigid monotheism of the Moham 
medan religion it was necessary that the Aristotelian metaphysics, 
and especially the Aristotelian theology, should be more fully adopted 
among the Arabs than among the Neo-Platonists and Christians, and 
that in consequence of the union among the former of philosophical 
with medical studies the works of Aristotle on natural science should 
be studied by them with especial zeal. Of the Arabian philosophers 
in the ast, the most important were Alkendi, who was still more 
renowned as a mathematician and astrologer, Alfarabi, who adopted 
the Neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation, Avicenna, the representative 
of a purer Aristotelianism and a man who for centuries, even among 
the Christian scholars of the later medieval centuries, stood in the 
highest consideration as a philosopher and, still more, as a teacher of 
medicine, and finally Algazel, who maintained a philosophical skep- 
ticism in the interest of theological orthodoxy. The most important 
Arabian philosophers in the West were Avempace (Ibn Badja), Abu- 
bacer (Ibn Tophail), and Averroés (Ibn Roschd), Avempace and 
Abubacer dwell in their works on the idea of the independent and 
gradual development of man, Abubacer (in his “ WVatural Man’) 
develops this idea in a spirit of opposition to positive religion, 
although he affirms that positive religion and philosophical doctrine 
pursue the same end, namely, the union of the human intellect with 
the divine. Averroés, the celebrated commentator of Aristotle, inter- | 


400 ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


prets the doctrine of the latter respecting the active and the passive 
intellect in a sense which is nearly pantheistic and which excludes the 
idea of individual immortality. He admits the existence of only one 
active intellect, and affirms that this belongs in common to the 
whole human race, that it becomes temporarily particularized in in- 
dividuals, but that each of its emanations becomes finally reab- 
sorbed in the original whole, in which alone, therefore, they possess 
immortality. 


The philosophy of the Arabs, and especially the Arabian translations of Aristotle, are treated of by 
Mohammed al Schahrastani (died a. p. 1153) in his History of religious and philosophical sects among the 
Arabs, written in Arabic and edited by W. Cureton, London, 1842-46—German translation by Haarbriicker, 
Halle, 1850-51. On the same subject Abulfaragius (of the thirteenth century), Hist. Dynast. (Oxford, 1663), 
and other Arabian scholars have written, and also the following authors: Huetius, De claris interpretibus, 
Paris, 1651, p. 123 seq.: Renaudot, De barbaricis Aristotelis versionibus, apud Fabr., Bibl. Gr., t. 111.. p. 
291 seq., ed. Harless, ef. I., p, 861 seq.; Brucker, Hist. Crit. Philos., I11., Leips. 1748, pp. 1-240 (Brucker follows 
particularly Moses Maimonides and the historian Pococke, but also copies many fables from the untrust- 
worthy Leo Africanus); Reiske, De principibus muhammedanis, qui aut ab eruditione aut ab amore 
litterarum et litteratorum claruerunt, Leips. 11747; Casiri, Bibliotheca Arabico-hispana, Madrid, 1760; 
Buhle, Commentatio de studii graecarum litterarum inter Arabes initiis et rationibus, in the Comm. 
reg. soc. Gotting, t. XI., 1791, p. 216; Proleg. edit. Arist. quam curavit Buhle, τ. I., Zweibriicken, 1791, 
p. 315 seq.; Camus, Notices et extraits des manuser. de la bibl. nat., t. VI. p. 892; de Sacy, Mém. sur 
Corigine de la littérature chez les Arabes, Paris, 1805; Jos. von Hammer in the Leipz. Litteraturzeitung, 
1815, 1814, 1820, 1826, and especially in Nos. 161-163, which contain a short history of Arabian metaphysics; 
A. Tholuck, De vi, quam Graeca philosophia in theologiam tum Mohammedanorwn, tum Judaeorum 
exercwerit, part. I., Hamb. 1835; F. Wiistenfeld, Die Akademien der Araber und ihre Lehrer, Gottingen, 
1837, Gesch. der arab, Aerzte, Gottingen, 1840; Aug. Schmdlders, Docum. philos. Arab., Bonn, 1836, and 
Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes, Paris, 1842 (where particularly the Motekallemin or 
philosophizing theologians and the philosopher Algazeli are treated of); Flugel, De arabicis seriptorum 
graec. interpretibus, Meissen, 1841; J. G. Wenrich, De auctorum graecorum versionibus et commentariis 
syriacis, arabicis, armeniacis, persicisque, Leips. 1842; Ravaisson, Mém. swr la philos. αὐ Aristote chez les 
Arabes, Paris, 1844 (in Compt. rend. de Vacad.,t. V.); Ritter, Gesch. der Philos., Vil. pp. 663-760 and VIII. 
pp. 1-175; Hauréan, Ph. Se., I. pp. 362-390; v. Hammer-Purgstall, Gesch. der arab. Litteratur, Vols. 
I.-VIL, Vienna, 1850-56; E. Rénan, De Philos. perip. apud Syros, Paris, 1852, p.51 seq. ; 8. Munk, Mélanges 
de philosophiejuive et arabe, renfermant des extraits méthodiques de la source de vie de Salomon Ibn 
Gebirol, dit Avicebron, etc., des notices sur les principaux philosophes arabes et lewrs doctrines, et une 
esquisse historique de la philosophie chez les juifs, Paris, 1859; ef. his article on the Arabes, Kendi, 
Farabi, Gazali, Ibn-Badja, Ibn Roschd, Ibn-Sina, in the Dictionnaire des sciences philos., Paris, 1844-52 ; 
Fr. Dieterici, Der Streit Zwischen Mensch und Thier (an Arabian poem of the tenth century), Die Vatu- 
ranschauung und Naturphil. der Araber im zehnten Jahrhundert aus den Schriften der lauteren 
Briider iibersetzt, Berlin, 1861, Die (mathematische) Propdideutik der Araber, Berlin, 1865, and Die Logik 
und Psychologie der Araber im 10, Jahrh. nach Chr., Leipsic, 1868, and Heinr. Steiner, Die Mutaziliten 
oder Freidenker im Islam als Vorldufer der islamischen Dogmatiker und Philosophen, nebst kritischen 
Anm, zu Gazzali’s Munkid, Leipsic, 1865. Cf. also E. H. Palmer, Oriental Mysticism, a treatise on the 
Suffistic and Unitarian Theosophy of the Persians, compiled from native sources, London, 1867; Leo- 
pold Dukes, Philosophisches aus dem 10. Juhrh. bei den Mohammedanern und Juden, Nakel, 1868; A.y. 
Kremer, Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islam, Leipsic, 1868. 

Of Alkendi write Abulfaragius, in his Hist. Dynast., IX.; and, among the moderns, Lackemacher, 
Helmst., 1719; Brucker, Hist. erit. philos., II1., Leipsic, 1743, pp. 63-69; Casiri, Bibl. Arab., 1. 853 seq. ; 
Wiistenfeld, Gesch. der arab, Aerzte und Naturforscher, Gottingen, 1840, p. 21 seq.; Schmélders, Zssat 
sur les écoles philos. chez les Arabes, p. 181 seq.; Hauréau, Ph. Se. 1., p. 363 seq. (who also makes some 
citations in the passage referred to from the Yractatus de erroribus philosophorum (of the thirteenth 
century, still existing in MS.); G. Fligel, Al-Kindi, genannt “der Philosoph der Araber,” ein Vorbild 
seiner Zeit und seines Volkes, Leipsic, 1857 (in the Abh. fiir die Kunde des Morgeniandes, published by 
the German Oriental Society, Vol. I. No. 2), in which (pp. 20-35) the titles of the two hundred and sixty- 








ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 407 


five works of Alkendi are enumerated as given in the Fihrist; and Munk, in the Dict. des Se. Ph., 8. το. 
Kendi, and Mélanges, pp. 339-341. 

On Alfarabi, ef. among others Casiri, Bibl. Arab.-Hisp., I. p. 190; Wustenfeld, Gesch. der arab, 
Aerzte und Naturf., p. 53 seq.; Schmélders, Docwm. philos. Arab., p. 15 seq.; Munk, Dict, 8. v. Farahi, 
and Mélanges, pp. 341-852; two of his works were printed in Latin, at Paris, in 1638, viz.: De Scientiis 
and De Intellectu et Intellecto (the latter published also with the works of Avicenna, Venice, 1495); in 
addition to these Schmélders gives two others, Abu Nasr Alfarabii de rebus studio Aristotelicae 
philosophiae praemittendis commentatio (pp. 17-25), and Abu Nasr Alfarabti fontes quaestionum (pp. 
43-56). A considerable number of citations from Alfarabius are to be found in the works of Albertus 
Magnus and others. Moritz Steinschneider, Al/faradi, Petersburg and Leipsic, 1869. 

Several of the works of Avicenna were translated into Latin before the end of the twelfth century, the 
Canones of the Art of Medicine being translated by Gerhard of Cremona, while Dominicus Gundisalvi and 
Avendeath the Jew translated his Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, De Coelo, De Mundo, Auscultat. 
Phys. and Metaphys., and his Analysis of the Organon (Jourdain, Recherches Critiques, p. 116 seq.) His 
Metuph. was edited at Venice in 1498. His Logic (in part) and several other works, under the title, 
Avicennae peripatetici philosophiae medicorum facile primi opera in lucem redacta, Venice, 1495; a 
short treatise on logic by Avicenna was published in a French translation by P. Vattier, at Paris, in 1658; a 
didactic poem, intended to convey elementary instruction and containing the main principles of logic, is 
included by Schmdlders in his Docum. Philos. Arab., pp. 26-42. A German translation of Avicenna’s poem, 
entitled “ Zo the Soul,” is given by v. Hammer-Purgstall in the Vienna Zeitschrift fiir Kumst, ete., 1835. 
His philosophy is discussed by Scharestani in his History of the relig. and phil. Sects, pp. 348-429 of the 
Arabian text, and 213-332 (Vol. 11.) of Haarbriicker’s German translation; on his logic see Prantl, Gesch. 
der Log. 11. pp. 818-861, and B. Haneberg, Zur Erkenntnizslehre von Ibn Sina und Albertus Magnus, in 
the Abh. der philos.-philol. el. der k. bayer. Akad. der Wiss., XI. 1, Munich, 1866, pp. 189-267. 

A translation of Algazel’s “ Makacid al filasifa” was brought about near the middle of the twelfth 
century, by Dominicus Gundisalvi; it was edited with the title, Logica et Philosophia Algazelis 
Arabis, by Peter Lichtenstein of Cologne, Venice, 1506. The Confessio Πα δὲ orthodororum Algaceliana 
is given in Pococke’s Spec. Hist. Arab., p. 274 seq., cf. Brucker, Wist. crit. philos., V., pp. 348 seq., 356 seq. 
The ethical treatise, entitled “ OQ Child,” has been published in Arabic and German by Jos. von Hammer- 
Purgstall, Vienna, 1888; in his Introduction, von Han:mer gives the particulars of the life of Algazel. 
Another ethical work, called “ The Scales of Actions,” translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Abraham ben 
Hasdai of Barcelona, has been published by Goldenthal under the title, Compendium docirinae ethicae, 
Leipsic, 1839. Tholuck, in the above-cited work, De γέ, etc., cites several theological dicta from a Berlin 
MS. of Algazel’s Liber quadraginta placitorum circa principia religionis. The work entitled “ The 
Reanimation of the Religious Sciences,” is discussed by Hitzig in the Zettschr. d. d. mergenl. Ges., VII.. 
1852, pp. 172-186, and by Gosche (see below). Cf. Aug. Schmdlders, Zssai sur les écoles philos. chez les 
Arabes et notamment sur la doctrine αὐ Algazali, Paris, 1842; Munk, Dictionn. des sc. phil., s. v. Gazali, 
and Mélanges, pp. 366-383, and R. Gosche, Ueber Ghazedlv’s Leben und Werke, in Abh. der Berliner 
Akad. ἃ. Wiss., 1858, phil.-hist. Cl., pp. 289-811; with reference to his logic see Prantl, II. pp. 861-878. 

On Avempace, see Munk, Mélanges de philos. juive et arabe, pp. 883-410. 

Abubacer’s work: “ Haji Ibn Jakdhan,’ was early translated into Hebrew, and was published in 
Arabic with a Latin translation by Ed. Pococke, under the title, Philosophus autodidactus sive epistola, 
in qua ostenditur quomodo ex infericrum contemplatione ad superiorum notitiam mens ascendere 
possit, Oxford, 1671 and 1700; it was translated from this Latin version into English by Ashwell and 
George Keith, a Quaker, from the Arabic original by Simon Ockley, into Dutch by other translators, and 
into German by Joh. Georg Pritius (Frankfort, 1726), and by J. G. Eichhorn (Der Naturmensch, Berlin, 
1783). Cf. on Abnbacer, Ritter, Gesch. der Ph., VIII. pp. 104-115, and Munk, Jfélanges, pp. 410-418. 

The works of Averroés were first printed in Latin in 1472, and afterwards very frequently, generally 
with the works of Aristotle. Of those who have written upon Averroés we name Lebrecht, in the 
Magazin fiir die Litteratur des Auslandes, 1842, No. 79 seq. ; E. Rénan, Averroés et l Averroisme, Paris, 1852, 
2d ed., 1865, and Munk, Dicet., III. p. 157 seq., and Mélanges, pp. 418-458, On his logic, see Prantl, Gesch. der 
Logik, I. pp. 374-885, and M. Jos. Miller, Philos. und Theol. des Averroés,in the Monumenta Saecularia, 
published by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Bavaria, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, March 28, 
1859, Munich, 1859. A medical work by Averroés, on therapeutics, was published in Latin under the title 
“ Colliget™ (Collijjat, Generalities), in the tenth volume of the works of Aristotle, together with the Com- 
mentary of Averroés, Venice, 1552, ete. An astronomical work, containing a summary of the Ptolemaic Al- 
magest, in which Averroés follows strictly the Ptolemaic system, is still existing in MS.,and also in a Hebrew 
translation, in the Imperial Library at Paris; in other works he said, with Ibn Badja and Ibn Tophaii, that 
the Ptolemaic computations were correct, but that the actual state of things did not correspond with the 
system of Ptolemy; the theory of epicycles and excentricities was improbable, and he wished, since he was 


408 ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. ee 


then too old for such inquiries, that his words might incite others to further investigations (Averr. in Arist., 
Metaph., XII. 8), And in fact, his somewhat younger contemporary, Abu Ishak al Bitrodji (Alpetragius, 
about 1200), the astronomer, and pupil of Ibn Tophail, in order to avoid the hypothesis of epicycles, excen- tal} 
tricities, and the two contrary motions of the spheres, originated another theory, of which the fundamental 
idea was, that the slower motion from east to west was to be explained not by a supposed motion in the con- 
trary direction, but from the diminished influence of the outermost moving sphere—an influence decreasing 
as the distance from it increased. The work of Alpetragius was translated by Michael Scotus into Latin in 
1217; another Latin translation, made from another in Hebrew, appeared at Venice, in 1531. Cf. Munk, ¥é., 
pp. 513-522. But Averroés has become far more renowned in philosophy than in medicine and astronomy, 
especially through his commentaries on the works of Aristotle. For several of these works he did a three- 


fol service, by preparing, 1) short paraphrases, in which he reproduced the doctrines of Aristotle in strictly ᾿ 
systematic order, omitting Aristotle’s examinations of the opinions of other philosophers, but occasionally st 
adding his own views and the theories of other Arabian philosophers, 2) commentaries of moderate extent, Ν 
which he himself designates as résumés, and which are commonly termed the intermediate commentaries, Al 
3) complete commentaries (of later date). The works of each kind relating to the Analytica Posteriora, ἢ 


the Physics, the De Coelo, De Anima, and Metaphysics, are still extant. (The Arabic original of the inter- 
mediate commentary on the De Anima exists, written in Hebrew characters, in the Library at Paris.) Of 
the works on the /sagoge of Porphyry, the Categ., De Interpr., Anal. Priora, Top., De Soph. E/., Rhetor., 
Poet., De Gen. et Corr., and Meteorolog., only the shorter commentaries and the paraphrases are in exist- 
ence. For the Nicom. Hthics Averroés wrote only a shorter commentary. Only paraphrases of the Parva 
Naturalia and of the four books De Partibus Animalium, and of the five books De Generatione Anima- 
liwm, are extant. There exists no commentary by Ibn Roschd on the ten Libri Hist. Animaliwm, nor on 
the Politics, of which, at least in Spain, no copies were at hand. The Greek originals of the Aristotelian 
writings were unknown to Ibn Roschd; he understood neither Greek nor Syriac; where the Arabic trans- 
lations were unclear or incorrect, he could only attempt to infer the correct meaning from the connection 
of the Aristotelian doctrine. Besides his Commentaries, Ibn Roschd composed several philosophical 
treatises, of which the more important were, 1) Tehafot al Tehafot, i. e., destructio destructionis, a refuta- 
tion of Algazel’s refutation of the philosophers; a Hebrew translation of this work is extant in MS., from 
which again a (very bungling) Latin translation was made, published at Venice in 1497 and 1527, and in 
the Supplement to several old Latin editions of the works of Aristotle, together with the Commentaries 
of Averroés. 2) Investigations concerning diverse passages of the Organon, in Latin, with the title: 
Quaesita in libros logicae Aristotelis, printed in the same Latin editions of Aristotle; Prantl (Gesch. der 
Log., ΤΙ. p. 874) regards these Quaesita, as also an “ Epitome” of the Organon, as spurious. 8) Physical 
treatises (on problems in the Physics of Aristotle), published in Latin in the editions mentioned. 4) Two 
treatises on the union of the pure (immaterial) intellect with man, or of the active intellect with the 
passive, in Latin, 2béd., with the titles: Hpistola de connexione intellectus abstracti cum homine and De 
animae beatitudine. 5) On the potentia or material intellect, extant only in a Hebrew translation, 
6) Kefutation of Ibn Sina’s division of beings into beings absolutely accidental (sublunary), beings accidental 
as such but rendered necessary through an agency external to themselves (God), and the absolutely necessary 
being—in reply to which Averroés remarks, that the necessary product of a necessary cause can never be 
called accidental; the work exists in Hebrew among the MSS. of the Imperial Library at Paris. 7) On 
the agreement of religion with philosophy, in Hebrew, ébid. 8) On the true sense of religious dogmas or 
ways of demonstrating religious dogmas, in Hebrew, <bid.,in Arabic, in the Escurial. Some other treatises 
are lost. 





a ae 


«πὸ ἐξ ξεν are 


Sprenger, in his work on the life and doctrine of “ Mohammad” (1., Berlin, 1867, p. 17), 
designates as the cause of the rise of Mohammedanism among the Arabs, the felt need of a 
religion at once monotheistic and antitrinitarian; but a need, adds Sprenger, is always and 
necessarily followed by an attempt to satisfy it, which attempt is repeated until the end is 
attained. In contradistinction from ecclesiastical Christianity, Mohammedanism can be re- 
garded as the result of the late but all the more energetic reaction of Subordinationism, 
which, since the Council of Nicaea, had been suppressed by violence rather than spiritually 
overcome, and from the stand-point of which the Trinitarian faith necessarily appeared as 
a concealed tritheism. An edict such as that of the Emperor Theodosius of the year 380, 
which threatened all who were not Catholics, and who were denominated as “inordinate 
madmen,” with temporal and eternal punishments, might indeed fortify Catholicism exter- 
nally, but could not strengthen it internally; on the contrary, it could only foster a 
languid and prescriptive faith, which continued only in controversies concerning dogmagie 


D> 


ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 409 


subtilties to manifest a certain vitality, but was unable to resist a violent shock from 
without. 

Ebionitic Christians had still continued, even after the triumph of Catholicism, to main- 
tain their existence, particularly in the Nabathzan wilderness. They were divided into 
several sects, of which some retained rather the features of Judaism, while others pos- 
sessed those of Orthodox Christianity. In the time of Mohammed there existed two of 
these sects in Arabia, the Rakusii and the Hanifs (Sprenger, I. 43 seq.). To the first 
belonged (according to Sprenger’s conjecture) Koss, who preached at Mecca the unity of 
God and the resurrection of the dead, and for this purpose also visited the fair at Okatz, 
where Mohammed heard him. The Hanifs were (according to Sprenger, 7b.) Essenes, who 
had lost nearly all knowledge of the Bible and had submitted to various foreign influences. 
but professed a rigid monotheism. Their religious book was called “ Roll of Abraham.” 
In the time of Mohammed several members of this sect were living in Mecca and Medina, 
and Mohammed himself, who originally had worshiped the gods of his people, became a 
Hanif. The doctrine of the Hanifs was Islam, 7. e., submission to the one God; they were 
themselves Moslim, 7. e., men characterized by such submission. Very considerable was 
the direct influence exerted by Judaism on Mohammed (cf. Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mo- 
hammed aus dem Judenthum aufgenommen? Bonn, 1833). The name Mohammed seems to 
have been an official designation assumed by the founder of the new religion; according to 
an old tradition he was originally called Kotham, and afterward also Abul Kasim (father of 
Kasim) after his eldest son; he, however, said of himself that he was the Mohammad, 7. e., 
the extolled, the Messiah announced by the Thorah, but that in the Gospel his name was 
Ahmad, 7. e., the Paraclete (see Sprenger, I. p. 155 seq.); Abraham had called him and the 
Son of Mary had foretold his coming (ἐδ... p. 166). 

In Mobammed himself and in his followers, the abstract idea of the one infinitely 
exalted being, to whom alone worship was due, led to the enthusiasm of a quickly-blazing 
fanaticism. This fanaticism pitilessly annihilated all resistance, but its subjects were 
unable toe appreciate in their full significance and to cultivate the many influences and 
forces of actual human life; they failed to recognize the immanence of the divine in the 
finite; they lacked the power to bring the sensual nature of man under that discipline 
which would make it ancillary to morality, and were obliged therefore either to govern it 
despotically or to leave it under the unchecked influence of passion, while no alternative 
was left to the rational spirit but the mechanical subjection of an unreflecting and fatalistic 
faith. to the will of Allah and to the revelation of himself as made through the Prophet. 
By a doctrine which was the direct opposite of the Christian doctrine of peace, and which 
called on men to fight for the glory of God, and by a course of action which received from 
this doctrine its religious sanction, extremely important results were attained in the begin- 
ning; but soon the period of stability commenced and the period of relaxation and degen- 
eracy quickly followed. 

It is reported that, in the year 640, what remained (said to be 50,120 volumes) of the 
Alexandrian Library, after its destruction in 392 by Christians under Bishop Theophilus, 
was burned by Amru, the General of the Caliph Omar, as a means of raising the Koran to a 
position of exclusive authority (Abulfarag., Hist. Dyn., p. 116). Be this a mere legend or an 
historical fact, it cannot be denied that the Mohammedan doctrine of Islam was completely 
antagonistic to the Old-Hellenie conception of life, as represented in the principal works 
of that collection. It was of necessity more hostile than Christianity to Greek paganism. 
Among the Grecian philosophies, the doctrine of Aristotle, although (especially in his 
ethics, which rested on the Hellenic principle of freedom and order) differing essentially 
in spirit from the doctrines of Mohammedanism, contained many points of agreement with 


410 ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


these doctrines. His doctrine of the personal unity of God made his metaphysics more 
acceptable to the Mohammedans than to the Fathers of the Christian Church. His physics 
was a source of information in a field of inquiry scarcely touched on in the Koran, and 
could not but be welcome as furnishing a scientific basis for the healing art. His logic 
could be of service as an instrument (organon) of method in every science, and especially 
in every theology which aspired to a scientific form. Thus Aristotehanism gradually 
found entrance among the Mohammedans, notwithstanding that the Koran forbade all free 
investigation concerning rehgious doctrines, and consoled those who doubted only with the 
hope of a solution of their doubts at the judgment-day. Still, foreign philosophy remained 
always confined to a narrow circle of inquirers. The rationalistic Mutazilin, the orthodox 
Ascharites, etc., were theological dogmatists (Motekallemin, Hebrew Medabberim, 7. e., Teachers 
of the Word, in distinction from the teachers of the Fikh, 7. e., the traditional law. 

The acquaintance of the Mohammedan Arabs with the writings of Aristotle was brought 
about through the agency of Syrian Christians. Before the time of Mohammed many 
Nestorian Syrians lived among the Arabs as physicians. Mohammed also had intercourse 
with Nestorian monks. Hareth Ibn Calda, the friend and physician of the prophet, was a 
Nestorian. It was not, however, until after the extension of the Mohammedan rule over 
Syria and Persia, and chiefly after the Abassidz had commenced to reign (A. D. 750), that 
foreign learning, especially in medicine and philosophy, became generally known among 
the Arabs. Philosophy had already been cultivated in those countries during the last days 
of Neo-Platonism, by David the Armenian (about 500 a. D., see above, p. 259; his Prolog. 
to Philos. and to the Jsagoge and his commentary on the Categ., in Brandis’ collection of 
Scholia to Arist.; his Works, Venice, 1823; on him, ef. C. F. Neumann, Paris, 1829) and 
afterward by the Syrians especially. Christian Syrians translated Greek authors, particu- 
larly medical, but afterward philosophical authors also, first into Syriac and then from 
Syriac into Arabic (or they perhaps made use also of earlier Syriac translations, some of 
which are to-day extant). During the reign and at the instance of Almamun (A. Ὁ. 
813-833) the first translations of works of Aristotle into Arabic were made, under the 
direction of Johannes Ibn-al-Batrik (7. e., the Son of the Patriarch, who, according to Renan 
[{ Δ, p. 57], is to be distinguished from Johannes Mesue, the physician); these transla- 
tions, in part still extant, were regarded (according to Abulfaragius, Histor. Dynast., p. 153 
et al.) as faithful but inelegant. A man more worthy of mention is Honein Ibn Ishak (Jo- 
hannitius), a Nestorian, who flourished under Motewakkel and died in 876. Acquainted 
with the Syriac, Arabic, and Greek languages, he was at the head of a school of inter- 
preters at Bagdad, to which his son Ishak ben Honein and his nephew Hobeisch-el-Asam 
also belonged. The works not only of Aristotle himself, but also of several ancient Aris- 
totelians (Alexander Aphrodisiensis, Themistius, and also Neo-Platonic exegetes, such as 
Porphyry and Ammonius), and of Galenus and others, were translated into (Syriac and) 
Arabic. Of these translations, also, some of those in Arabic are still existing, but the 
Syriac translations are all lost. (Honein’s Arabic translation of the Categories has been 
edited by Jul. Theod. Zenker, Leips. 1846.) In the tenth century new translations, not 
only of the works of Aristotle, but also of those of Theophrastus, Alexander of Aphro- 
disias, Themistius, Syrianus, Ammonius, ete., were produced by Syrian Christians, of whom 
the most important were the Nestorians Abu Baschar Mata and lJahja ben Adi, the Tag- 
ritan, as also Isa ben Zaraa. The Syriac translations (or revisions of earlier translations) 
by these men have been lost, but the Arabic translations were widely circulated and have 
in large measure been preserved; they were used by Alfarabi, Avicenna, Averroés, and the 
other Arabian philosophers. The Republic, Timaeus, and Laws of Plato were also trans- 
lated into Arabic. Averroés (in Spain, about 1150) possessed and paraphrased the Rep., 


Pi nase γερὰ op mom 


Plo a: a 
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τρόπον. eee 


SS te ae κε’ το 


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yr 


ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 411 


but he did not possess the Politics of Aristotle; the book existing in MS. at Paris, entitled 
Siaset, i. e., Politica, is the spurious work De Regimine Principum 8. Secretum Secretorum ; 
the Politics of Aristotle is not known to exist in Arabic. Further, extracts from the 
Neo-Platonists, especially from Proclus, were translated into Arabic. The Syrians were 
led, especially in consequence of their contact with the Arabs, to extend their studies 
beyond the Organon; they began to cultivate in the Arabic language all the branches of 
philosophy on the basis of Aristotle’s works, and in this they were afterward followed by 
the Arabs themselves, who soon surpassed their Syrian teachers. Alfarabi and Avicenna 
were the scholars of Syrian and Christian physicians. The later Syrian philosophy bears 
the type of the Arabian philosophy. The most important representative of the former was 
Gregorius Barhebrzeus or Abulfaragius, the Jacobite, who lived in the thirteenth century 
and was descended from Jewish parents, and whose compendium of the Peripatetic phi- 
losophy (Butyrum Sapientiae) is still of great authority among the Syrians. 

Alkendi (Abu Jusuf Jacub Ibn Eshak Al Kendi, ὦ ¢., the father of Joseph, Jacob, son 
of Tsaac, the Kendzan, of the district of Kendah) was born at Basra on the Persian Gulf, 
where later, in the tenth century, the “Brothers of Purity,” or the ‘Sincere Brethren,” 
who collected in an Encyclopedia the learning then accessible to the Arabians, were 
located. He lived during and after the first half of the ninth century, dying about 870. 
He was renowned as a mathematician, astrologer, physician, and philosopher. He com- 
posed commentaries on the logical writings of Aristotle and wrote also on metaphysical 
problems. In theology he was a rationalist. His astrology was founded on the hypothesis 
that all things are so bound together by harmonious causal relations that each, when com- 
pletely conceived, must represent as in a mirror the whole universe. 

Alfarabi (Abn Nasr Mohammed ben Mohammed ben Tarkhan of Farab), born near the 
end of the ninth century, received his philosophical training mainly at Bagdad, where he 
also began to teach. Attached to the mystical sect of the Safi, which Said Abul Chair 
had founded about A. D. 820 (under the unmistakable influence of Buddhism, although 
Tholuck [‘‘ Ssufismus,” Berlin, 1821, and “ Blithensammlung aus der morgenlind. Mystik, 
Berlin, 1825] assigns to it a purely Mohammedan origin), Alfarabi went at a later epoch 
to Aleppo and Damascus, where he died a. Ὁ. 950. In logic Alfarabi follows Aristotle 
almost without exception. Whether logic is to be regarded as a part of philosophy or not, 


‘depends, according to Alfarabi, on the greater or less extension given to the conception of 


philosophy, and is therefore a useless question. Argumentation is the instrument by 
which to develop the unknown from the known; it is employed by the wtens logicus ; logica 
docens is the theory which relates to this instrument, argumentation, or which treats of it 
as its subject (swbjectum). Yet logic also treats of single concepts (incomplera) as elements 
of judgments and argumentations (according to Alfarabi, as reported by Albertus M., De 
Praedicabil., I. 2 seq.. ef. Prantl, Gesch. der Log., II., p. 302 seq.). Alfarabi defines the 
universal (see Alb. M., De Praed., II. 5) as the wnum de multis et in muitis, which definition 
is followed immediately by the inference that the universal has no existence apart from the 
individual (non habet esse separatum a multis). It is worthy of notice that Alfarabi does not 
admit in its absolute sense the aphorism: singulare sentitur, universale intelligitur, but 
teaches that the singular, although in its material aspect an object of sensible perception, 
exists in its formal aspect in the intellect, and, on the other hand, that the universal, 
although as such belonging to the intellect, exists also im sensu, in so far as it exists 
blended with the individual (Alb., An. post., I. 1.3). Among the contents of the Meta- 
physics of Alfarabi, mention should be made of his proof of the existence of God, which 
was employed by Albertus Magnus and later philosophers. This proof is founded on 
Plat., Tim., p. 28: τῷ γενομένῳ φαμὲν ὑπ’ αἰτίου τινὸς ἀνάγκην εἶναι γενέσθαι, and Arist., 


412 ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 


Metaph., XVI. 7; ἔστι τοίνυν τι καὶ ὃ κινεῖ, etc., or on the principle that all change and all 
development must have a cause. Alfarabi distinguishes (Fontes Quaestionum, ch. 3 seq., in 
Schmélders Doc. Phil. Ar., p. 44) between that which has a possible and that which has a 
necessary existence (just as Plato and Aristotle distinguish between the changeable and 
the eternal). If the possible is to exist in reality, a cause is necessary thereto. The world 
is composite, hence it had a beginning or was caused (ch. 2). But the series of causes and 
effects can neither recede in infinitum, nor return like a circle into itself; it must, there- 
fore, depend upon some necessary link, and this link is the first being (ens primum). This 
first being exists necessarily ; the supposition of its non-existence involves a contradiction. 
It is uncaused, and needs in order to its existence no cause external to itself. It is the 
cause of all that exists. Its eternity implies its perfection. It is free from all accidents. 
It is simple and unchangeable. As the absolutely Good it is at once absolute thought, 
absolute object of thought and absolute thinking being (intelligentia, intelligibile, intelligens). 
It has wisdom, life, insight, might and will, beauty, excellence, brightness; it enjoys the 
highest happiness, is the first willing being aud the first object of will (desire). In the 
knowledge of this being Alfarabi (De rebus studio Arist. phil. praemitt. comm., ch. 4, ap. 
Schmolders, Doc. ph. Arab., p. 22) sees the end of philosophy, and he defines the practical 
duty of man as consisting in rising, so far as human force permits it, into likeness with 
God. In his teachings respecting that which is caused by or derived from God (Fontes 
Quaest., ch. 6 seq.) Alfarabi follows the Neo-Platonists. His fundamental conception is 
expressed by the word emanation. The first created thing was the Intellect, which came 
forth from the first being (the Νοῦς of Plotinus; this doctrine was logically consistent 
only for Plotinus, not for Alfarabi, since the former represented his One as superior to all 
predicates, while Alfarabi, in agreement with Aristotle and with religious dogmatics, 
recognized in his first being intelligence). From this intellect flowed forth, as a new 
emanation, the Cosmical Soul, in the complication and combination of whose ideas the basis 
of corporeality is to be found. Emanation proceeds from the higher or outer spheres to 
the lower or inner ones. In bodies matter and form are necessarily combined with each 
other. Terrestrial bodies are composed of the four elements. The lower psychical powers, 
up to the potential intellect, are dependent on matter. The potential intellect, through the 
operation (in-beaming) of the active divine intellect, is made actual (tntellectus in actu or in 
efectu), and this actual intellect, as resulting from development, may be called acquired 
intellect (intellectus acquisitus, after the doctrine of Alexander of Aphrodisias, concerning 
the νοῦς ἐπίκτητος, see above, p. 185). The actual human intellect is free from matter, 
and is a simple substance, which alone survives the death of the body and remains inde- 
structible. Evil is a necessary condition of good in a finite world. All things are under 
divine guidance and are good, since all was created by God. Between the human under- 
standing and the things which it seeks to know there exists (as Alfarabi teaches, De 
Intellecto et Intellectu, p. 48 seq.) a similarity of form, which arises from their having both 
been formed by the same first being, and which makes knowledge possible. 

Avicenna (Abu Ali Al Hosain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina) was born at Afsenna, in the 
Province of Bokhara, in the year 980. His mind was early developed by the study of 
theology, philosophy, and medicine, and in his youth he had already written a scientific 
encyclopedia. He taught medicine and philosophy in Ispahan. He died at Hamadan in 
the fifty-eighth year of his life. His medical Canon was employed for centuries as the 
basis of instruction. In philosophy he set out from the doctrines of Alfarabi, but modi- 
fied them by omitting many Neo-Platonic theorems and approximating more nearly 
to the real doctrine of Aristotle. The principle on which his logic was founded, and 
which Averroés adopted and Albertus Magnus often cites, was destined to exert a great 


ere 





Gites 


se BN a ie ak FA ce ES Ss , - τ ΞΟ: 





ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 413 


{nfluence, It was worded thus: intellectus in formis agit universalitatem (Alb., De Praedicab., 
II. 3and6). The genus, as also the species, the differentia, the accidens, and the pro- 
prium, are in themselves neither universal nor singular. But the thinking mind, by com- ᾿ 
paring the similar forms, forms the genus logicwm, which answers to the definition of the 
genus, viz.: that it is predicated of many objects specifically different, and answers the 
question, “What is it?” (tells the guiditas). It is the genus naturale which furnishes 
the basis of comparison. When the mind adds to the generic and specific the individual 
accidents, the singular is formed (Avic., Log., Venice edition, 1508, f. 12, ap. Prantl, Ge- 
schichte der Logik, 11. 347 seq.). Only figuratively, according to Avicenna, can the 
genus be called matter and the specific difference, form; such phraseology (frequent in 
Aristotle) is not strictly correct. Avicenna distinguishes several modes of generic exist- 
ence, viz.: ante res, in rebus, and post res. Genera are ante res in the mind of God; for 
all that exists is related to God as a work of art is related to the artist; it existed in 
his wisdom and will before its entrance into the natural world of manifold existence; in 
this sense and only in this sense is the universal before the individual. Realized with its | 
accidents in matter the genus constitutes the natural thing, res naturalis, in which the uni- 
versal essence is immanent. The third mode of the existence of the genus is that which | 
it has in being conceived by the human intellect; when the latter abstracts the form and/ 
then compares it again with the individual objects to which by one and the same definition 
it belongs, in this comparison (respectus) is contained the universal (Avec., Log.,-f. 12, 
Metaph., V.1, 2, f. 87, in Prantl, II. p. 349). Our thought, which is directed to things, 
contains nevertheless dispositions which are peculiar to itself; when things are thought, | 
there is added in thought something which does not exist outside of thought. Thus uni- | 
versality as such, the generic concept and the specific difference, the subject and predicate 
and other similar elements, belong only to thought. Now it is possible to direct the atten- | 
tion, not merely to things, but also to the dispositions which are peculiar to thought, and 
this takes places in logic (Metaph., I. 2; III. 10, in Prantl, II. p. 320 seq.). On this is based 
the distinction of “first” and “second intentions.” The direction of attention to things is 
the first intention (intentio prima); the second intention (intentio secunda) is directed to the 
dispositions which are peculiar to our thinking concerning things. Since the universal as 
such belongs not to things, but to thought, it belongs to the second intention. The prin- 
ciple of individual plurality, according to Avicenna, is matter, which he regards, not with 
Alfarabi as an emanation from the Cosmical Soul, but with Aristotle as eternal and un- 
created; all potentiality is grounded in it, as actuality is in God. Nothing changeable can ᾧ 


| 
} 


come forth directly from the unchangeable first cause. His first and only direct product | 
is the intelligentia prima (the νοῦς of Plotinus, as with Alfarabi); from it the chain of ema- 
nations extends through the various celestial spheres down to our earth. But the issuing / 
of the lower from the higher is to be conceived, not as a single, temporal act, but as an. 
eternal act, in which cause and effect are synchronous. The cause which gave to things 
their existence must continually maintain them in existence; it is an error to imagine that 
things once brought into existence continue therein of themselves. Notwithstanding its 
dependence on God, the world has existed from eternity. Time and motion always were 
(Avie., Metaph., VI. 2 et al.; ef. the account in the Tractatus de Erroribus, ap. Hauréau, Ph. 
Sc., I. p. 368). Avicenna distinguishes a twofold development of our potential under- 
standing into actuality, the one common, depending on instruction, the other rare, and 
dependent on immediate divine illumination. According to a report transmitted to us by 
Averroés, Avicenna, in his Piilosophia Orientalis, which has not come down to us, contra- 
dicted his Aristotelian principles, and conceived God as a heavenly body. 

Algazel (Abu Hamed Mohammed Ibn Achmed Al-Ghazzali), born A. p. 1059 at Ghaz- 


414 ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


zalah in Khorasan, taught first at Bagdad, and afterward, having become a Sfifi, resided 
in Syria. He died a. p. 1111 at Tus. He was a skeptic in philosophy, but only that 
his faith might be all the stronger in the doctrines of theology. His course in this 
respect marked a reaction of the exclusively religious principle of Mohammedanism against 
philosophical speculation—which in spite of all accommodation had not made itself fully 
orthodox—and particularly against Aristotelianism; between the Mysticism of the Neo- 
Platonists, on the contrary, and the Sifism of Algazel there existed an essential affinity. 
In his “ Makacid al filasifa” (The Aims of the Philosophers) Algazel sets forth the doc- 
trines of philosophy, following essentially Alfarabi and particularly Avicenna. These 
doctrines are then subjected by him to a hostile criticism in his “ Tehafot αἱ filasifa” 
(Against the Philosophers), while in his “ Fundamental Principles of Faith” he presents 
positively his own views. Averroés wrote by way of rejoinder his Destructio Destructionis 
Philosophorum. Algazel exerted himself especially to excite a fear of the chastisements of 
God, since in his opinion the men of his times were living in too great assurance. Against 
the philosophers he defended particularly the religious dogmas of the creation of the world 
in time and out of nothing, the reality of the divine attributes and the resurrection of the 
body, as also the power of God to work miracles, in opposition to the supposed law of 
cause and effect. In the Middle Ages his exposition of logic, metaphysics, and physics, as 
given in the Makacid, was much read. 

The result of the skepticism of Algazel was in the East the triumph of an unphilo- 
sophical orthodoxy ; after him there arose in that quarter no philosophers worthy of men- 
tion. On the other hand, the Arabian philosophy began to flourish in Spain, where a 
succession of thinkers cultivated its various branches. 

Avempace (Abu Bekr Mohammed ben Jahja Ibn Badja), born at Saragossa near the end 
of the eleventh century, was celebrated as a physician, mathematician, astronomer, and 
philosopher. About 1118 he wrote, at Seville, a number of logical treatises. At a later 
period he lived in Granada, and afterward also in Africa. He died at a not very advanced 
age in 1138, without having completed any extensive works; yet he wrote several smaller 
(mostly lost) treatises, among which, according to Munk (Mélanges, p. 386), were Logical 
Tractates (still existing, according to Casiri, Biblioth. Arabico-Hisp. Escurialensis, I. p. 179, in 
the library of the Escurial), a work on the soul, another on the conduct of the solitary 
(régime du solitaire), also on the union of the universal intellect with man, and a farewell 
letter; to these may be added commentaries on the Physics, Meteorology, and other works 
of Aristotle relating to physical science. Munk gives the substance of the ‘Conduct of 
the Solitary,” as reported by a Jewish philosopher of the fourteenth century, Moses of 
Narbonne (Meél., pp. 389-409). This work treats of the degrees by which the soul rises 
from that instinctive life which it shares with the lower animals, through gradual emanci- 
pation from materiality and potentiality to the acquired intellect (intellectus acquitsitus), 
which is an emanation from the active intellect or Deity. Avempace seems (according to 
Averroés, De Anima, fol. 168 A) to have identified the ntellectus materialis with the imagi- 
native faculty. In the highest grade of knowledge (in self-consciousness) thought is 
identical with its object. 

Abubacer (Abu Bekr Mohammed ben Abd al Malic Ibn Tophail al Keisi) was born in 
about the year 1100, at Wadi-Asch (Guadix), in Andalusia, and died in 1185, in Morocco. 
He was celebrated as a physician, mathematician, philosopher, and poet, and pursued still 
further the path of speculation opened up by Ibn Badja. His chief work, that has come 
down to us, is entitled Haji Ibn Jakdhan, 7. e., the Living One, the Son of the Waking One. 
The fundamental idea is the same as in Ibn Badja’s ‘‘Conduct of the Solitary ;” it is an 
exposition of the gradual development of the capacities of man to the point where his 








ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Aly 


intellect becomes one with the divine. But Ibn Tophail goes considerably farther than his 
predecessor in maintaining the independence of man in opposition to the institutions and 
opinions of human society. In his theory he represents the individual as developing him- 
self without external aid. That independence of thought and will, which man now owes 
to the whole course of the previous history of the human race, is regarded by him as 
existing in the natural man, out of whom he makes an extra-historical ideal (like Rousseau 
in the eighteenth century). Ibn Tophail regards positive religion, with its law founded on 
reward and punishment, as only a necessary means of discipline for the multitude; 
religious conceptions are in his view only types or envelopes of that truth to the logical 
comprehension of which the philosopher gradually approaches. 

Averroés (Abul Walid Mohammed Ibn Achmed Ibn Roschd), born a. Ὁ. 1126, at Cor- 
dova, where his grandfather and father filled high judicial offices, studied first positive 
theology and jurisprudence, and then medicine, mathematics, and philosophy. He ob- 
tained subsequently the office of judge at Seville, and afterward at Cordova. He wasa 
junior contemporary and friend of Ibn Tophail, who presented him to Calif Abu Jacub 
Jusuf soon after the latter’s ascent of the throne (1163), and recommended him in place of 
himself, for the work of preparing an analysis of the works of Aristotle. Ibn Roschd won 
the favor of this prince, who was quite familiar with the problems of philosophy, and, at a 
later epoch, he became his physician in ordinary (1182). For a time he was in favor also 
with the son of this prince, Jacub Almansur, who succeeded to his father’s rule in 1184, 
and he was still honored by him in 1195. But soon after this date he was accused of 
cultivating the philosophy and science of antiquity to the prejudice of the Mohammedan 
religion, and was robbed by Almansur of his dignities and banished to Elisana (Lueena) 
near Cordova; he was afterward tolerated in Morocco. <A strict prohibition was issued 
against the study of Greek philosophy, and whatever works on logic and metaphysics were 
discovered, were delivered to the flames. Averroés died in 1198, in his seventy-third 
year. Soon afterward the rule of the Moors in Spain came to an end. The Arabian 
philosophy was extinguished, and liberal culture sunk under the exclusive rule of the 
Koran and of dogmatics. 

Averroés shows for Aristotle the most unconditional reverence, going in this respect 1 
much farther than Avicenna; he considers him, as the founders of religions are wont 
to be considered, as the man whom alone, among all men, God permitted to reach the 
highest summit of perfection. Aristotle was, in his opinion, the founder and perfecter of 
scientific knowledge. In logic, Averroés everywhere limits himself io merely annotating 
Aristotle. The principle of Avicenna: ‘intellectus in formis agit universalitatem, is also his 
(Averr., De An., I. 8; cf. Alb. M., De Praedicab., II. ch. 6). Science treats not of universal) 
things, but of individuals under their universal aspect, which the understanding recognizes 
after making abstraction of their common nature (Destr. destr., fol. 17: sctentia autem non est 
scientia ret universalis, sed est scientia particularium modo universali, quem jacit intellectus in 
particularibus, quum abstrahit ab ws naturam unam communem, quae divisa est in materiis). 
The forms, which are developed through the influence of higher forms, and, in the last resort, 
through the influence of the Deity, are contained embryonically in matter. The most noticeable 
thing in his psychology is the explanation which he gives of the Aristotelian distinction 
between the active and the passive intellect (νοῦς παθητικός and ποιητικός). Thomas 
Aquinas, who opposes the explanation, gives it in these words: intellectum substantiam esse 
omnino ab anima separatam, esseque unum in omnibus hominibus ;—nec Deum facere posse quod 
sint plures intellectus ; but, he says, Averroés added: per rationem concludo de necessitate quod 
tntellectus est unus numero, firmiter tamen teneo oppositum per fidem. In his commentary to 
the twelfth book of the Metaphysics, Averroés compares the relation of the active reason 


416 ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


, to man with that of the sun to vision; as the sun, by its light, brings about the act 
_ of seeing, so the active reason enables us to know; hereby the rational capacity in man 
_ is developed into actual reason, which is one with the active reason. Averroés attempts 
to reconcile two opinions, the one of which he ascribes to Alexander of Aphrodisias, and 
the other to Themistius and the other Commentators. Alexander, he says, had held the 
passive intellect (νοὺς παθητικός) to be a mere ‘ disposition” connected with the animal 
faculties, and, in order that it might be able perfectly to receive all forms, absolutely form- 
less; this disposition was in us, but the active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός), which was the 
cause of its development or of its becoming receptive intellect (νοῦς ἐπίκτητος), was without 
us; after our death our individual intellects no longer existed. Themistius, on the contrary, 
and the other Commentators, had regarded the passive intellect not as a mere disposition 
connected with the lower psychical powers, but as inhering in the same substratum to 
which the active intellect belonged; this substratum, according to them, was distinct 
from those animal powers of the soul which depend on material organs, and as it was 
immaterial, immortality was to be predicated of the individual intellect inhering in it. 
Ϊ Averroés, on the other hand, held that the passive intellect (νοῦς παθητικός) was, indeed, 
more than a mere disposition, and assumed (with Themistius and most of the other Com- 
mentators, except Alexander) that the same substance was passive and active intellect 
(namely, the former, in so far as it received forms, the latter, ia so far as it constructed 
forms); but he denied that the same substance in itself and in its individual existence 
was both passive and active, assuming (with Alexander) that there existed only one active 
intellect in the world, and that man had only the “disposition” in virtue of which he 
could be affected by the active intellect; when the active intellect came in contact with 
this disposition there arose in us the passive or material intellect, the one active intellect 
becoming on its entrance into the plurality of souls particularized in them, just as light is 
decomposed into the different colors in bodies; the passive intellect was (according to 
Munk’s translation): ‘‘wne chose composée de la disposition qui existe en nous et dun intellect 
gui se joint ἃ cette disposition, et qui, en tant qwil y est joint, est un intellect prédisposé (en 
puissance) et non pas un intellect en acte, mats qui est intellect en acte en tant qwil west plus 
Joint ἃ la disposition” (from the Commentaire moyen sur le traité de 1 Ame, in Munk’s Mél., 
p. 447); the active intellect worked first upon the passive, so as to develop it into actual 
and acquired intellect, and then on this latter, which it absorbed into itself, so that after 
our death it could be said that our νοῦς, mind, continued to exist—though not as an indi- 
vidual substance, but only as an element of the universal mind. But Averroés did not 
identify this universal mind (as Alexander of Aphrodisias identified the νοῦς ποιητικός) 
with the Deity himself, but conceived it (following in this the earlier Arabian commenta- 
tors and indirectly the Neo-Platonists) as an emanation from the Deity, and as the mover 
of the lowest of the celestial circles, 7. 6., the sphere of the moon. This doctrine was 
developed by Averroés particularly in his commentaries on the De ‘An., whereas, in the 
Paraphrase (written earlier) he had expressed himself in a more individualistic sense 
(Averr., ap. Munk, Mélanges, p. 442 seq.). The psychological teaching of Averroés resem- 
bled, therefore, in the character of its definitions, that of Themistius, but in its real 
content that of Alexander Aphrodisiensis, since both Averroés and Alexander limited the 
individual existence of the human intellect (νοῦς) to the period preceding death, and recog- 
nized the eternity only of the one universal active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός). For this reason 
the doctrines of the Alexandrists and of the Averroists were both condemned by the 
Catholic Church (cf. Vol. II. § 3). 
Averroés professed himself in no sense hostile to religion, least of all to Mohammedan- 
ism, which he regarded as the most perfect of all religions. He demanded of the philoso- 





a ο͵οα ᾽““““  -----------------Ρρσο.-.ςβῥ 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 4171 


pher a grateful adherence to the religion of his people, the religion in which he was 
educated. But by this ‘adherence ” he meant only a skillful accommodation of his views 
and life to the requirements of positive religion—a course which could not but fail to 
satisfy the real defenders of the religious principle. Averroés considered religion as 
containing philosophical truth under the veil of figurative representation; by allegorical 
interpretation one might advance to purer knowledge, while the masses held to the literal 
sense. The highest grade of intelligence was philosophical knowledge; the peculiar 
religion of the philosopher consisted in the deepening of his knowledge; for man could 
offer to God no worthier cultus than that of the knowledge of his works, through which 
we attain to the knowledge of God himself in the fullness of his essence (Averroés in the 
larger Commentary to the Metaph., ap. Munk, Mélanges, p. 455 seq.). 


§ 97. The philosophy of the Jews in the Middle Ages was partly 
the Cabala and partly the transformed doctrine of Plato and Aris- 
totle. The Cabala, a secret philosophy of emanations, is contained in 
two works entitled Jezirah (Creation) and Sohar (Brightness). The 
former was in the tenth century already regarded as a very ancient 
book, but it was probably composed after the middle of the ninth 
century. The doctrine of the Sohar was built up, after the com- 
mencement of the thirteenth century, on the basis of earlier ideas, 
by Isaac the Blind and his pupils Ezra and Azriel, and other Anti- 
Maimunists. It was committed to writing in about the year 1800 
by a Spanish Jew, most probably by Moseh ben Schem Tob de Leon. 
It was subsequently increased by additions and made the subject of 
commentaries. ‘Tradition ascribes the Jez77zah now to Abraham, the 
father of the Jewish race, and now to Rabbi Akiba (who was exe- 
cuted in consequence of his participation in the insurrection of Bar- 
cochba—about 135 a. p.—whom he had announced as the Messiah, 
and of his violation of the edict issued after the suppression of the 
revolt, forbidding him to teach), and the Schar to Simeon Ben Jochai, 
the pupil of the latter. Some of the fundamental Cabalistie doc-| 
trines are indeed old, but in the course of their development they 
were considerably modified under the influence of Greek and par- 
ticularly of Platonic conceptions—an influence exerted, perhaps, tirst 
through the medium of the Jewish-Alexandrian religious philosophy, 
and afterward through Neo-Platonic writings. Contact with foreign 
types of culture—first and especially with Parseeism, then with Hel- 
lenism and the Roman world, and afterward also with Christianity 
and Mohammedanism—widened the view of the Jewish people and 
led by degrees to a more and more complete removal of the national 
limits in its theological belief. But in proportion as its conception 


of the world became more broad and complete, its conception of 
27 





418 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


God became more transcendent: Jehovah was conceived as more 
spiritual, higher, farther removed from the individual, and, finally, as 
exalted above space and time, and his active relation to the world was 
regarded as depending on the agency of beings intermediate between 
God and the world. Thus the Persian doctrine of angels first found 
entrance among the Jews, being especially cultivated by the Essenes. 
Then arose, particularly at Alexandria under the co-operating in- 
fluence of Greek philosophy, the doctrine of the divine attributes 
and energies, which appears in its most developed form, blended 
with the Platonic theory of ideas-and the Stoic Logos-doctrine, in 
Philo’s writings, and which, as a doctrine of the Logos and of the 
ons, found its way into the system of the Christian faith and into 
the Christian Gnosis. The secret doctrine of the Rabbis in the first 
Whristian centuries was founded chiefly on the allegorical interpreta- 
tion of two passages in the Bible, viz.: the history of creation, in 
the book of Genesis, and the vision of the chariot of God (the Jer- 
kaba), in the prophecy of Ezekiel. In the later, more developed 
Gnosis of the Cabala, the origin of the world in God was represented 
in the form of a gradually descending series of emanations of the 
lower from the higher.—Of the theologians who philosophized on the 
basis of human reason, the earliest belonged to the sect of the Karzeans 
or Karaites (who rejected the Talmud; the sect was founded about 
A. Τ. 761, by Anan ben David). The most notable among these was 
David ben Merwan al Mokammez (about 900). More worthy of 
mention is the Rabbinist Saadja ben Joseph al Fajjumi (892-942), 
the rationalistic defender of the Talmud and opponent of the Karaites, 
who undertook to demonstrate the reasonableness of the Mosaic and 
post: Mosaic articles of Jewish faith. Solomon Ibn Gebirol, who lived 
about 1050 in Spain, is the representative of a class of Jewish thinkers 
who wrote under the influence of the Neo-Platonic philosophy. Solo- 
mon Ibn Gebirol was regarded by the Christian Scholastics as an 
Arabian philosopher, and he was cited by them under the name of 
Avicebron. His doctrines exerted a material influence on the later 
development of the Cabala as contained in the Sohar. Near the end 
of the eleventh century Bahja ben Joseph composed an ethical work 
on the duties of the heart, in which more stress was laid on internal 
morality than on mere legality. A direct reaction against philosophy 
was encouraged by the poet Juda ha-Levi (about 1140) in his book 
entitled Ahosari. In this book the author represents, first, Greek 


| 








Tt ts 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 418 


philosophy, and then Christian and Mohammedan theology, as van- 
quished by the doctrines of Judaism, and develops the grounds on 
which the Rabbinic Judaism was founded; he lauds the secret doc- 
trine of the Jezirah, which book he ascribes to the patriarch Abraham. 
A reconciliation of Jewish theology with Aristotelian philosophy was 
attempted about the middle of the twelfth century by Abraham ben 
David of Toledo; soon after him the solution of the same problem 
was undertaken with far greater success by the most celebrated of 
the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, Moses ben Maimun 


(Moses Maimonides, 1135-1204). In his “ Guide of the Doubting,” | 


Maimonides ascribed to Aristotle unconditional authority in the 
science of sublunary things, but limited it in the science of heavy- 
enly and divine things by asserting the greater authority of revela- 
tion. By giving prominence to the spiritual and moral ideas of 
Judaism, he exerted on all Jewish theology (even that of the Kara- 
ites, as seen, notably, in the doctrine of Ahron ben Elia in the 
fourteenth century) a salutary and, in spite of violent reactions, a 
permanent influence. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the 
philosophy of the Arabian Aristotelians, being proscribed by the 
Mohammedan rulers, found an asylum among the Jews in Spain and 
France, especially in Provence, their writings being translated from 
Arabic into Hebrew, and, in some cases, made the subject of new 
commentaries. As acommentator of the Paraphrases and Commen- 
taries of Averroés, and also as the author of independent works, Levi 
ben Gerson is especially distinguished; his writings fall in the first 
half of the fourteenth century. Through the agency of Jews, Arabic 
translations of (genuine and spurious) works of Aristotle and Aris- 


totelians were made into Latin. In this way the entire Aristotelian | 


philosophy was first brought to the knowledge of the Scholastics, | 


who were thus inspired soon afterward to procure for themselves 
other translations of the works of Aristotle, which were founded 
immediately on the Greek text. 


A survey of the entire philosophy of the Jews is given by Sal. Munk, in his Mélanges de philosophie 
jwice et arabve, pp. 461-511 ( Bsquisse historique de la philosophie chez les juifs); a German translation of 
this sketch, by B. Beer, was published at Leipsic in 1852. A. Schmied] has an article on the conceptions 
of substance and accident in the philosophy of the Jews of the Middle Ages, in the Monatsschr. fiir Gesch. 
u. Wiss. des Judenthums, ed. by Frankel, Breslau, 1864. Cf. J. M. Jost, H. Gratz, and Abr. Geiger in their 
histories of Judaism, and Julius First, Bibliotheca jud«ica, bibliographisches Handbuch der gesammten 
jidischen Litteratur, Leipsic, 1849-63, and Steinschneider, Jiidische Litteratur, in Ersch und Gruber's 
Eneyklopidie, Sect. IL, Vol. 27. 

A. Nager, Die Religionsphilosophie des Talmud, Leipsic, 1864. 

A collection of cabalistic writings, set on foot by Joh. Pistorius, and containing a Latin translation d 


490 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


the Jezirah, as also Joh. Reuchlin’s Libri tres de arte cabbalistica (first published in 1517), was printed at 
Basel in 1587, under the title: Artis Cabbalisticae Scriptores. The Jezirah was published in Hebrew at 
Mantua in 1562, and then translated into Latin and annotated by Rittangelus, Amsterdam, 1642, ete. The 
Sohar was published first at Mantua, 1558-60, then in more complete form at Cremona, 1560, and Lublin, 
1623, also Amsterdam, 1670; again in an extensive collection of cabalistie writings, published by Chris- 
tian Knorr von Rosenroth, under the title: Habbala denudata seu doctrina Ebraeorum transcendentalis 
οὐ metaphysica atque theologica, Vol. I., Sulzbach, 1677-78, Vol. II., Frankfort, 1684, and separately, Sulz- 
bach, 1684; also Amsterdam, 1714, 1728, 1772, 1805, Krotoschin, 1844, 1858, ete. In the seventeenth century 
the genuineness of the Sohar was disputed by Joh. Morin (Heercit. bibi., p. 363 seq.; ef. Tholueck, Coma. 
dea vi, yuam graeca philos. in theolog. tum Mohammedanorum, tum Judaeorum exercuerit, I. p. 16 seq.), 
and by Leon of Modena (in the work: Are Nohem, published by Julius First, Leipsic, 1840). Of modern 
works on the Cabala the most important is Ad. Franck’s Syst. de la Kabbale, Paris, 1842, translated into 
German by Ad. Jellinek, Leipsie, 1844, under the title: Die Kabbala oder die Religionsphilosophie der 
Iebrder ; ἃ minute critique of this work, but one that goes too far in its opposition to Franck’s conception 
of the cabalistie doctrine, is the work of H. Joél, Midrasch ha-Sohar, die Religionsphilosophie des Sohar 
undihr Verhdltniss zur aligemeinen jiidischen Theologie, Leipsic, 1849. Cf. also, L. Zunz, Die gottee- 
dienstlichen Vortrage der Juden, Berlin, 1832 (chap. IX., die Geheimlehre); Franck, Dewar mémoires sur 
la Cabbale, Paris (Acad.), 1889; Franck, Dict. ph., Art. Kabbala; Adler, in Noack's Jahrbiicher for 1846 
and 1841: M.S. Freystadt, Philos. cabbalistica et pantheismus, ex fontibus primariis adumbr., Kénigs- 
berg, 1832, Philosophus et Cabbalista, Choker u- Mekubbal, ibid. 1840; Tholuck, De ortu cabbalae (part IL. 
of the above-cited Commentatio), Hamburg, 1837; H. Gritz, Gnosticismus und Judenthwm, Krotoschin, 
1846; Ad. Jellinek, Jfoses ben Schem Tob de Leon und sein Verhiltniss zwm Sohar, Leipsic, 1851. Beitrage 
zur Geschichte der Kabbala, Leipsic, 1852, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, Leipsic, 1855; 8. Munk, 
Mélanges, p. 275 seq. et al.; Isaac Misses, Die jiidische Geheimlehre, Cracow, 1862-68; Gritz, Gesch. der 
Juden, Vol. VII. 1863, Note 3, p. 442 seq., and Note 12, p. 487 seq.; Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, its doctrines, 
development, and literature, an essay, London, 1865. For the later history of the Cabala we may cite, ia 
addition to the histories of Judaism, the work by Abr. Geiger, Zeon da Modena (1571-1648), seine 
Stellung zur Kabbalah, zum Talmud und zum Christenthum, Breslau, 1856. 

Saadja’s Book concerning Religions and Dogmas, translated in the twelfth century from Arabic into 
Hebrew, by Jehuda Ibn Tibbon, has been repeatedly edited ; a German translation by Jul. Furst appeared 
at Leipsic, in 1845. Of him treat Sal. Munk, Notice sur Saadia, Paris, 1888; Leop. Dukes, in Litt. Mit- 
theilungen tiber die dltesten hebrdischen Ewegeten, Grammatiker und Lewikographen, Stuttgard, 1844. 

From the Fons Vitae, the principal work of Ibn Gebirol, extensive extracts which were made from the 
Arabic original by the Jewish philosopher, Schem Tob ibn Falaquera, of the thirteenth century, and trans- 
lated by him into Hebrew (with the Hebrew title, Mekxor Ohajjim), have been published, together with a 
French translation, by 8. Munk, in his Mélanges de philos. juive et arabe, Paris, 1857; there is a notice of 
a Latin MS. of the whole work, by Seyerlen, in Zeller’s Theol. Jahrb., XV. and XVI. The discovery that 
Ibn Gebirol was identical with the Avicebron (or Avencebrol) often cited by the Scholastics, was announced 
by 5. Munk in the Literaturblatt des Orients for 1845, No. 46, col. 721. Specimens of the religious poetry 
of Ibn Gebirol are given by 5. Munk, Mélanges, p. 159 seq., and Michael Sachs, in Die religidse Poesie der 
Juden in Spanien, Berlin, 1845, pp. 8-40. A treatise, written by Ibn Gebirol in 1045, on the Improvement 
of Morals, has been repeatedly published in the Hebrew translation, made in 1167 by Jehuda ibn Tibbon, 
last at Luneville, 1804. A treatise on the Soul, translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundisalyi, is men- 
tioned by Munk, p. 170, as a work probably composed by Ibn Gebirol, but containing passages interpolated 
by the translator. 

The work of Bahja ben Joseph, on the Duties of the Heart, was published in the Hebrew translation 
of Jehuda Ibn Tibbon, at Naples, in 1490, ete., and last by Is. Benjakob, Leipsic, 1846; also with a German 
translation, by R. J. Firstenthal, Breslau, 1836. Of Bahja ben Joseph, Ad. Jellinek treats, in the edition 
by Is. Benjakob, Leipsic, 1846, and M. F. Stern, Die Herzenspflichien von B. b. J., Vienna, 1856. 

The Khusart of Jehuda ha-Levi, in the translation made at Lunel in 1167, by Jehuda Ibn Tibbon of 
Granada, has been published many times, last at Hanover, in 1888, Prague, 1838-40, and, in part, Leipsic, 
1841-42: with a Latin translation by Joh. Buxtorf, Basel, 1660, and in German (not complete), ed. H. 
Jolowiez and Day. Cassel, Leipsic, 1841-42. 

The work composed in Arabic by Abraham ben David ha-Levi of Toledo, and entitled “ The Sublime 
Faith,” has been preserved in a Hebrew translation, which was published, together with a German trans- 
lation by Simpson Weil, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, in 1852. 

The principal philosophical work of Moses Maimonides, Da/alat al Hatrin (Guide of the Doubting), 
was published several times before 1480 in the Hebrew translation of Samuel ibn Tibbon (lived about 1200), 
under the title, “ Moreh Nebuchim,” no place of publication being given,—then Venice, 1551, ete., with 
Latin translation, Paris, 1520, and, likewise with Latin translation, ed. Joh. Buxtorf, Basel, 1629, translated 








THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 421 


(in part) into German, by R. J. Farstenthal, Krotoschin, 1838, and translated by Simon Scheyer, Frankfort 
on-the-Main, 1838, and recently in Arabic and French, with critical, literary, and explanatory notes, by S. 
Munk, under the title, Ze guide des égarés, traité de théologie et de philosophie, Vol. 1. -11Π1. Paris, 1856. 
“61, 66. In regard to the latter extremely meritorious work, it is only to be regretted that the habit of 
incorrectly translating the title has, through the practice of the author, apparently obtained a new sanction, 
although Munk himself, in his note on the title. II. p. 879 seq., gives as its true sense: Indication ow guide 
pour ceux gui sont dans la perplexité, dans le trouble ow dans Vindécision, so that not those who have 
gone astray, but those who are wandering in uncertainty, the seekers or doubters, are to be understood, 
those who, in view of the different ways opened before them, the ways of philosophy and positivism, 
of allegorical and literal biblical interpretation, are undecided and in need of counsel; the Latin translation, 
Paris, 1520, has the correct title: Dua seu director dubitantium aut perplecorwm; Albertus Magnus cites 
itas Due Neutrorum; others, Directio Perplerorum. The Ethics of Maimonides has been published in 
a German translation by Simon Falkenheim, Koénigsberg, 1832. His Vocabulariwm Logicae was published 
at Venice in 1550, ete., and Jast at Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1846. Of Maimonides treat—-besides Munk— 
Franck, in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques, Vol. IV. p.31, Simon Scheyer, Frankfort-on-the- 
Main, 1845, Abr. Geiger, Rosenberg, 1850, M. Joél, Die Religionsphilosophie des M. b. M., in the “ Pro- 
gramme” of the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau, 1859, and, with special reference to his influence 
on Albertus Magnus, the Scholastic, in another work published at Breslau in 1863. The Ethics of Mai- 
monides, and its influence on the Scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth century, are discussed by Ad. 
Jaraczewsky, in the Zeitschr. 7. Philos. u. philos. Kritik, New Series, Vol. XLVI. Halle, 1865, pp. 5-24. 
Moses ben Maimiin’s acht Capitel, arab. und deutsch mit Anm. von M. Wolff, Leipsic, 1863. 

Commentaries on the Moreh Nebuchim, or on parts of it, have been written, in particular, by Schem 
Tob ben Joseph ibn Falaquera (1280, printed at Pressburg in 1837), Josephibn Caspi (about 1300, published 
at Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1848), Moses ben Josua of Narbonne (composed, 1355-62, edited by Goldenthal, 
Vienna, 1852), and Is. Abrabanel (in the fifteenth century, published by M. J. Landau, Prague, 1831-82). 

Commentaries by Levi ben Gerson,relating to the Zsagoge of Porphyry, the Categ. and the De Interpr., 
are printed in the Latin translation of Jacob Mantino, in the first volume of the old Latin editions of the 
works of Aristotle, as also are the Commentaries of Averroés. His philosophical and theological work, 
entitled “ Milhamoth Adonai,” was published at Riva di Trento, in 1560. M. Joél (Breslau, 1862) and J. 
Weil (Paris, 1868) treat of his religious philosophy, and Prantl (Gesch. der Log., Il. pp. 394-896) of his 
logic. There has lately appeared: Levi ben Gerson, Milchamot ha-Schem. Die Kampfe Gottes. Re- 
ligionsphilosophische und kosm. Fragen, in sechs Biichern abgehandelt. (In Hebrew.) New edition, 
Leipsic, 1866. 

The system of religious philosophy of Ahron ben Elia of Nicomedia, the Karaite, completed at Con- 
stantinople in 1346, was published by Delitzsch and Steinschneider, Leipsic, 1841. Cf. Franck, Archives 
Tsraélites, 1842, p. 173, and Jul. First, Geschichte des Kartierthwms, Leipsic, 1862-65. 


Ad. Franck estimates the date of the rise of the Cabala as earlier than the dates assigned 
by all others who have investigated the subject. He sees traces of it in the Septuagint, 
in the proverbs of Ben Sira and in the Book of Wisdom, and accounts for them as arising 
from the influence of the Zoroastrian religion on the Jews. Yet Franck admits that in the 
Cabala dualism is replaced by the theory of emanations, that ideas, forms, and attributes 
take the place of angels, and that ‘‘mythology is forced back by metaphysics,” and it is 
quite a matter of question whether this transformation arose from the influence of Jewish 
monotheism alone, or whether Hellenic modes of thought were not also in their measure the 
cause of it; that at least the more developed cabalistic system gives evidence of the influence 
of Platonism, is beyond question. The conjecture (defended, among others, by S. Munk, 
Palistina, p. 515, and Mél., p. 468) is a very probable one, that the Esszi or Essenes were 
the first who held the half-mystical, half-philosophical doctrine, which was developed among 
the Jews not later than the time of the rise of Christianity, and whose influence was mani- 
fested in the development of Christian Gnosticism and in the doctrines of the Cabala. 

At a later epoch, theorems of the Neo-Platonic philosophy, known at first, perhaps, 
through original Greek texts, but shortly afterward through Arabic translations, and cer- 
tamly also the philosophy of Ibn Gebirol, exerted an influence on the development of the 
eabalistic doctrine. The doctrine of angels, applied to the biblical history of creation and 
the vision of Ezekiel, was apparently the earliest form of a doctrine which subsequently 


422 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


entered into the Cabala (in which form it had perhaps been already held by the Essenes) ; 
at a considerably later period, and having but a tolerably superficial connection with this 
earlier speculation, appears to have followed the development of the doctrine of the 
Sephiroth and the worlds, under Jewish-Alexandrian, Gnostic, and Neo-Platonic influences. 
Respecting the beginnings only conjectures are possible, such is our lack of positive 
information; respecting the more developed Cabala there exist data for a more definite 
judgment. 

The need of finding a middle term to mediate between the Deity, conceived as tran- 
scendent, and the visible world, led to the cabalistic speculations, in which the Oriental 
doctrine of angels and the Platonic theory of Ideas, as modified at Alexandria, were blended 
together. The question raised by some of the later Cabalists and by historians as to 
whether the cabalistic Sephiroth were beings distinct from God (as affirmed by Rabbi 
Menachem Reccanati, and, in modern times, by H. Joél, who represents them as creatures), 
or momenta of God’s existence, which are only subjectively distinguished by us (as, ac- 
cording to Corduero, Rabbi David Abbi Simra maintained), or whether God (according 
to the conciliatory theory of Corduero, adopted by Franck) was regarded as indeed above, 
but also as in and not without them, seems incapable of solution, since it implies in the 
Cabala the existence and maintenance of distinctions which a doctrine so much the work 
of fancy, and so little of the reflective reason, was not capable of containing. Of a similar 
nature, as we have seen, is the uncertainty in which we are placed with regard to Philo’s 
doctrine of the Logos and of the other Potencies or Ideas, since we find him sometimes 
ascribing to them an attributive, and sometimes a substantial form of existence (see above, 
§ 63, p. 230 seq.). The doctrine of emanations, advanced in the Cabala, has not the char- 
acter of a theory resting on philosophical grounds and put forward in conscious opposition 
to the doctrine of creation; it is intended rather as an interpretation of the latter. But 
that the idea of emanation is present in the fundamental doctrines of the Cabala is none the 
less true, and it is incorrect (with H. Joél) to consider those doctrines as containing only 
the dogmatic theory of creation, and to seek for the doctrine of emanation exclusively in 
the later additions and commentaries, although it is indeed in these latter that the doctrine 
is most definitely developed and is based on metaphysical axioms. 

In the Jezirah the outlines of the doctrines of God, of the intermediate beings, and of 
the worlds, are presented. The author of the book considers (in Pythagorean and Platonic 
fashion) the series of numbers (Sephiroth) and the letters of the alphabet, ‘which are the 
elements of the divine word, and are inscribed on the air at the boundary of the intellectual 
and physical worlds,” as the basis of the world-soul and of the whole creation. 

The Sohar teaches the incognoscibility of God as he really is, and his gradual manifesta- 
tion through the series of emanations. God, the Ancient of Days, the Hidden of the 
Hidden Ones, is, apart from his revelation in the world, a nothing, so that the world, 
created by him, came forth out of nothing. (This doctrine recalls the Basilidian doctrine 
of the non-existent God, and also the doctrine of Dionysius.) This nothing is infinite, and 
is therefore called the Limitless, Hn-Soph. Its light originally filled all space: beside it 
nothing existed. But in order that something else might come into existence, it concen- 
trated itself into a portion of space, so that outside of itself there was a void, which it pro- 
ceeded to fill with a light, whose brightness diminished in proportion to the removal of 
the light from its source. n-Soph first revealed himself in his word or his working, his 
son, the first man, Adam Kadmon, the man in the vision of Ezekiel (Hzek., ch. i.). The 
potencies or intelligences which constitute this Adam Kadmon (as parts of his being, just 
as the δυνάμεις or λόγοι are parts of the Logos of Philo) are the ten Sepiiroth, numbers, 
forms, circles of light, which surround the throne of the Highest. The three first Sephi- 


aac 


Sa 


ΞΦ 


ἜΞΩ 5 


= 


Bt 


- A eee 














THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 423 


roth are, 1) Kether, crown, 2) Chokhma, wisdom (σοφία), 3) Binah, understanding (λόγος). 
(This separation of σοφία and λόγος belongs to the Post-Philonic period, but in the present 
form is of much later date still.) The seven other Sephiroth are, 4) Chesed, grace (or 
Gedulah, greatness), 5) Din, judgment, rigor (or Geburah, strength), 6) Tiphereth, beauty, 
4) Nezach, firmness, 8) Hod, splendor, 9) Jesod, foundation, 10) Malkuth, kingdom. Occa- 
sionally, the second, fourth, and seventh of the Sephiroth are grouped together, and entitled 
pillars of grace, the third, fifth, and eighth being termed pillars of strength, and the first, 
sixth, and ninth, middle pillars. (This recalls the Gnostic distinction between the just God 
and the good God, which, however, here becomes a mere distinction of powers or attributes, 
in order to preserve the monotheistic principle.) The Sephiroth constitute the first ema- 
nation, or the world Azilah, which is followed by three other worlds (named after Isaiah 
xliii. 7), viz.: the world Beriah (from barah, to create, to shape), containing the pure forms 
or simple substances (ideas), which are conceived as spiritual, intelligent beings; then the 
world Jezirah (from jazar, to form), the world of the celestial spheres, of the Souls or 
Angels; and, lastly, the world Asijjah (from asah, to make), the world of the material 
works of God, of objects which are perceptible through the senses, and which arise and 
decay. (With the four-fold division of Plotinus: the One, the Nous, with ideas immanent 
in the same, the soul, and the material realm, this division agrees in so far as it represents 
the ideas still as distinct from the Sephiroth.) The three first Sephiroth exert their influence 
in the spiritual world, the next three in the psychical, and the three next in the material 
world. In man, the spiritual, immortal soul (neschama) belongs to the first of the three 
worlds, the animating breath (ruach) to the second, and the breath of life (nephesch) to the 
third. The soul wanders through different bodies, until it rises purified into the world of 
spirits. The last soul to enter into the earthly life, will be that of the Messias. 

To the fanciful Cabala, a philosophy which followed the guidance of the understanding, 
formed a contrast that sometimes led to mutual enmities. The rise of this philosophy was 
essentially conditioned on the contact of Judaism with Hellenism and Mohammedanism. 
Of little importance were the logico-plilosophical studies of Jewish physicians, such as, in 
particular, Isaac Israeli (flourished about 900; died at an advanced age, about 940-950; 
according to Steinschneider’s conjecture, in his work on Alfarabi, p. 248, Isaac Israeli was 
the author of an old commentary on the Jezirah). The Karaites, who broke with the 
Talmudic tradition, were the first Jewish theologians, who, following the example of the 
Mohammedan theologians, treated of dogmatics in systematic form. In this they were 
afterward followed by the Rabbinic theologians (Rabbinists). 

Saadja was born at Fajjum, in Egypt, in about the year 892. He was appointed at the 
head of the Jewish school at Sora, or Sura, in Babylon in 928, and died in 942. He was 
celebrated not only as a philosopher, but also as a religious poet, and was (as Jost 
expresses it, Gesch. des Judenthums, II., Leipsic, 1858, p. 279) “a fruit of the Jewish soil, 
modified by grafts from the Arabian garden.” In the year 933 he wrote his principal work 
on religious philosophy, in which, following, as it seems, the example of his older Karaite 
contemporary, David ben Merwan al Mokammez of Racca in Arabian Trak, he attempts 
to demonstrate the reasonableness of the articles of the Jewish faith and the untenable- 
ness of the dogmas and philosophemes opposed to them. The work contains (according 
to Julius First), besides the Introduction, ten sections, with subjects severally as follows: 
1) The world and its beings are created; 2) The Creator of all things is One; 3) Law and 
Revelation; 4) Obedience to God and disobedience, perfect righteousness and bondage; 
5) Merit and guilt; 6) The nature of the soul and its future existence; 7) Revivification of 
the dead ; 8) Emancipation and redemption ; 9) Reward and punishment; 10) Ethics. The 
cardinal points of his philosophy are the unity of God, plurality of attributes without plu- 


494 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


rality of persons, the creation of the world out of nothing, and not from material elements 
previously existing, the inviolability of the revealed law, the freedom of the will, future 
retribution and (rejecting the doctrine of its transmigration) the reunion of the soul with 
the body at the resurrection, which is to take place when the number of souls which were 
to be created has been exhausted. The substance of the teaching of Saadja is therefore 
in unison throughout with Jewish orthodoxy; but the form which it took as a system of 
religious philosophy was in large measure determined by the precedent of the Arabian 
Motekallemin, the Mutuzilin beg those between whose doctrine and that of Saadja the 
greatest resemblance exists. (The Jfutazilin were a rationalizing fraction of the Mote- 
kallemin, who took from the dogma of predestination something of its severity, by reducing 
it to the doctrine of mere foreknowledge, in order to save human freedom and moral 
responsibility ; the Ascharites, on the contrary, insisted especially upon the truth of this 
dogma in all its severity.) The positive influence of Aristotelianism is slight. Yet Saadja 
shows an acquaintance with some of the logical doctrines of Aristotle, and especially with 
his doctrine of categories, and he (II. 8) expressly undertakes to prove the non-applicability 
of these latter to the Deity. On the other hand, he opposes some doctrines which are 
founded on Aristotelianism, such as the eternity of the world and also the naturalistic 
biblical criticism of Chivi Albachi (of Bactria), the Rabbinist. 

In Spain the earliest representative of philosophy among the Jews was Salomo ben 
Jehuda ben Gebirol (or Gabirol, 7. e., Gabriel, in Arabic, Abu Ajjub Soleiman ibn Jahja ibn 
Djebirul), whom Sal. Munk has discovered to be identical with the philosopher whom the 
Scholastics knew under the name of Avicebron (or Avencebrol), as author of the work “ Fons 
Vitae” (Mekor hajim), and whom they regarded as an Arabian philosopher. Born in 1020 
or 1021 at Malaga, and educated at Saragossa, he labored in the years 1035-1069 or 1070 as 
a religious poet, moralist, and philosopher. His principal work was the Fons Vitae. Schem 
Tob, who translated the most important parts of it into Hebrew, defines the general idea 
which underlies the whole work as being contained in the doctrine that even spiritual sub- 
stances are in some sense material, the matter of which they are formed being spiritual 
matter, the substratum of their forms a sort of basis into which the form descends from 
above. Albertus Magnus says (Summa totius Theol., I. 4, 22), that the work ascribed to 
Avicebron rested on the hypothesis that things corporeal and incorporeal were of one mat- 
ter (corporalium et incorporalium esse materiam unam), and Thomas Aquinas (Quaest. de 
Anima, Art. VI.) names him as the author of the doctrine that the soul and all substances, 
except God, are compounded of matter and form. From the extracts published by Munk it 
appears how this hypothesis squares with the whole of his philosophy, which arose from 
the blending of Jewish religious doctrines with Aristotelian, and, in particular, with Neo- 
Platonic philosophemes. The first book treats of matter and form in general and of their 
different kinds ; the second, of matter as that which gives body to the universe (to which the 
categories apply); the third, of the existence of the (relatively) simple substances, the middle 
essences which are said to be contained in the created Intellect, and are intermediate be- 
tween God, the first Cause, and the material world; the fourth, of these intermediate 
essences as consisting of matter and form; the fifth, of matter and form in the most 
general sense of the terms or of universal matter and universal form, followed by consid- 
erations relative to the divine will, as the outcome of the divine wisdom, through which 
being is educed from nothing, or as the middle term between God, the first substance, and 
all that consists of matter and form, or, again, as that source of life whence all forms 
emanate. All the arguments of the author postulate the Platonic theory of the real exist- 
ence of all which is thought by means of universal concepts. Everything, argues Avice- 
bron, that subsists falls under the concept of subsistence, therefore all things which subsist 








THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 495 


possess real subsistence in common with each other; but this common element cannot 
be a form, since it is in the form of an object that its peculiarity and difference from other 
objects consists; it must therefore be matter—matter in the most general sense (materia 
universalis), of which corporeal and spiritual matter are the two species. Since form can 
only have its existence in matter, the forms of intelligible things must possess some sort 
of material substrate peculiar to themselves. God, who is immaterial, is called form 
only in au unnatural sense. (It would have been more consistent either to apply the 
general thesis to God, or to deny the separate existence of God, and to identify him with 
the materia universalis or the material substance. The latter alternative was chosen by 
David of Dinant, who was probably not uninfluenced by the doctrine of Avicebron—and in 
modern times again by Spinoza.) In the doctrine of the matter peculiar to intelligible 
essences, Avicebron follows Plato, in so far as the latter, as is reported by Aristotle, 
ascribed to the ideas a material substratum (which ascription was the necessary conse- 
quence of their hypostatization), and also Plotinus, who enounced explicitly the distinction, 
contained at least by implication in the doctrine of Plato, of the different kinds of matter. 
(Plotinus, Ennead., 11. 4, 4: “ with the μορφή, form, there is everywhere necessarily joined 
the ὕλη, matter, or the izoxeuevov, substrate, of which it is the μορφή; if the sensible 
world, the image of the unseen or intelligible world, consists of matter and form, there 
must also be a kind of matter as well as form in the archetype.”) The Jewish philosopher 
was not acquainted with the works of Plotinus, but he probably had met some of the Neo- 
Platonic writings in Arabic translations. These writings, nearly all of which are pseudony- 
mous, and which after the end of the twelfth century were known to the Scholasties in 
Latin translations, and were so employed by them, were (according to Munk, Mélanges, 
p- 240 seq.; Munk follows in part the authority of Mohammed al Schahrestani, an Arabian 
historian, who wrote of religious and philosophical sects, and died in the year 1153) the 
following : 

1) The Elementa Theologiae of Proclus. 

2) Pseudo-Empedocles, on the Five Elements, and perhaps still other works ascribed to 
Empedocles, translations of which had been brought from the East to Spain, soon after the 
commencement of the tenth century, by Mohammed ibn Abdallah ibn Mesarrah of Cordova; 
in them the ancient natural philosopher is credited with teaching that the Creator made the 
materia prima as primitive element; from this emanated the Intellect, and from the Intel- 
lect the Soul; the vegetative soul was the rind of the animal soul, this the rind of the anima 
rationalis, and the latter again that of the anima ‘ntellectualis ; the different individual souls 
were parts of the universal soul, while the product of this soul was nature, in which hate 
reigned, as love reigned in the universal soul; seduced by nature, the individual souls had 
turned aside to the sensuous world, while for their rescue, purification, and recovery to the 
communion of things intelligible, the prophetic spirits went forth from the universal soul. 

3) Pseudo-Pythagoras, who represents symbolically the Creator, the Intellect, the Soul, 
and Nature, by the numerical terms: Monad, Duad, Triad, and Tetrad, or distinguishes 
them as, 1) unity before eternity, 2) unity with eternity, 3) unity after eternity and before 
time, and 4) unity in time. 

4) Pseudo-Aristotle’s Theologia, a work which in the ninth century had already been 
translated into Arabic and was known in a Latin translation to the Scholastics. This trans- 
lation was printed at Rome, in 1519, with the title: Sapientissimi philosophi Aristotelis 
Stagyritae theologia sive mystica philosophia secundum Aegyptios, and is reprinted in Du 
Val’s complete edition of the works of Arist.; following this translation and also the Arabic 
text, Munk gives a number of extracts from the work in his Mélanges, p. 249 seq. In this 
work the Neo-Platonic doctrine of the first Cause, of the Intellect, and of the pure Forms 


49° THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


(Ideas), which are in it, of the world-soul with the individual souls, and of nature as com: 
prising the things which arise and perish, is developed, the immateriality of the pure forms 
contained in the Intellect is asserted, on the authority of the Metaphysics, which is men- 
tioned as an earlier work by the same author, and the theery is combated that all sub- 
stances, with the exception of the Deity, consist of matter and form. Between the One 
and the Intellect Pseudo-Aristotle inserts the divine Word, the Logos. Cf. Hanneberg, Die 
Theologie des Aristoteles, in the Reports of the Munich Academy of Sciences, 1862, I. 1-12. 

5) Perhaps the work De Causis, which likewise contains Neo-Platonic doctrines, for the 
most part in literal extracts from the Justitutio Theologica of Proclus. It is a late compila- 
tion of thirty-two metaphysical theses, and was perhaps not made until after the time 
of Ibn Gebirol; possibly the compiler was David, the Jewish commentator (as Albertus 
Magnus supposes, who, however, was unacquainted with the source of the compilation; 
Thomas recognized as such source the “ Hlevatio Theologica” of Proclus, by which his 
Στοιχείωσις θεολογική, Institutio Theologica—perhaps the work of a pupil of Proclus—is to be 
understood). As a supposed work of Aristotle it was translated into Latin, about A. Ὁ. 
1150, by the Archdeacon Dominicus Gundisalvi, with the aid of Johannes Avendeath (Ibn 
David ?). a converted Jew, and was known to the later Scholastics and used by Alanus ab 
Tnsulis (Alanus of Jille), who cites it as “liber de essentia purae bonitatis.” The belief 
that it was used by Aristotle was, notwithstanding the better knowledge of Albertus and 
Thomas, long entertained by many, and it was printed in the first Latin editions of the 
works of Aristotle (Venice, 1496, and in Vol. VII. of the Lat. ed. of the works of Aristotle 
and Averroés, Venice, 1552). Analyses of its contents are to be found in Hauréau’s Phil. 
Scoi., I. 284 seq., and in Vacherot’s Hist. Critique de Vécole d’ Alexandrie, III. 96 seq. In it 
abstract concepts are treated as possessing real existence; that which corresponds to the 
more abstract concept is treated as being the higher, earlier, and more powerful cause; 
being is placed before life, and life before individual existence. The Pseudo-Pythagorean- 
distinction between the highest form of existence, which is before eternity, the Intelleci, 
which is with eternity, the Soul, which is after eternity and before time, and temporal 
things, is found also in this work. Cf. Hanneberg, Reports, etc., 1863, pp. 361-388. 

Considerable as was the influence of the philosophy of Ibn Gebirol with a portion of 
the Scholastics (and, in particular, with Duns Scotus), it was correspondingly small with 
the Jews of the period next succeeding, among whom only his poems and ethical writings 
procured for his name any popularity. But the Arabian philosophers of the twelfth cen- 
tury seem not to have known of him at all. Aristotelianism, which, in consequence of the 
gradually increasing influence of the writings of Ibn Sina, was making its way among the 
Mohammedans and Jews in Spain, drove out the Neo-Platonic ideas, which, however, soon 
found a place of refuge in the Cabala. To this must be added, that the intermediate posi- 
tion assigned by Ibn Gebirol to the Will, which he represented as emanating from the 
divine Wisdom, notwithstanding the stress laid by him in single passages on the unity of 
this will with God, and his attempts to conceive it as an attribute, was of a nature to give 
offence to the more rigid monotheists. 

Bahja (or Bahijja?) ben Joseph composed, near the end of the eleventh century, a work 
on the “ Duties of the Heart,” in which, commencing with a consideration of the unity of 
God, he sketches out a complete system of Jewish Morals. The author seeks to demon- 
strate, by reason, Scripture, and tradition, that the performance of spiritual duties is not a 
mere supererogatory addition to that piety which is manifested in obedience to law, but 
is the foundation of all laws. 

Jehuda ben Samuel ha-Levi (born about 1080, died 1150), a celebrated author of reli- 
gious songs, in his work entitled Khosari—in which the scenes of the dialogues are based 








THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 427 


on the (historical) conversion of a Chazar king to Judaism—expresses himself moderately 
respecting the Mohammedan and Christian religions, but with severity respecting Greek 
(Aristotelian) philosophy, which denied that the world had a beginning in time. He warns 
his readers not to approach this philosophy. He seeks, in a popular style, to justify the 
Jewish law on rational grounds. 

As the author of a “ Microcosmus”’ (about 1140), Josef Ibn Zaddek should be mentioned. 

Abraham ben David, of Toledo, wrote, in the year 1160, in the Arabic language, a work 
called ‘* The Sublime Faith,” in which he defends the Aristotelian philosophy, but combats 
strongly the Neo-Platonism of Ibn Gebirol. He develops in particular the doctrine of the 
freedom of the human will. 

Moses Maimonides, or Maimuni (Moseh, son of Maimun the judge), was born at Cor- 
dova, March 30, 1135, and retired with his father, on account of the religious compulsion 
attempted by the Almohades, first to Fez, and then (1165) by way of Palestine to Egypt, 
and lived in Fostat (ancient Cairo), where he died December 13, 1204. Educated in the Aris- 
totelian philosophy, and acquainted with Arabic commentators (in particular with Abu- 
Bacer; he did not, on the contrary, read the works of Averroés until a few years 
before his death), he introduced in his Explanation of the Mischnah (composed 1158-1168) 
and in the fourteen Books of the Law (1170-1180) systematic order into the Talmud-Con- 
glomerate (whereas the historical sense in him, as in his contemporaries generally, remained 
undeveloped). His chief philosophical work (completed about A. D. 1190), the “ Guide of 
the Doubting,” contains (according to Munk’s judgment, Mélanges, p. 486) nothing which in 
philosophical respects was of decisive importance or originality, but it contributed mightily 
toward bringing the Jews to the study of the Aristotelian philosophy, through which they 
fecame able to transmit to Christian Europe the science of the Arabs, and thereby to exercise 
a considerable influence on the Scholastic philosophy. Maimonides’ influence was greatest 
on the theology of the Jews. The fundamental idea in his works is that the law was © 
given to the Jews, not merely to train them to obedience, but also as a revelation of the 
highest truths, and that, therefore, fidelity to the law in action is by no means sufficient, 
but that the knowledge of the truth is also a religious duty. By this teaching he offered 
a powerful incitement to speculation in religious philosophy, yet he also contributed by his 
enunciation of definite articles of faith to a narrow determination of Jewish dogmas, 
although his own investigations bear throughout a rationalizing character. Maimonides is 
no friend to astrological mysticism: we are only to believe that which is either attested by 
the senses or strictly demonstrated by the understanding or transmitted to us by prophets 
and godly men. In the province of science, he regards Aristotle as the most trustworthy 
leader, and only differs from him when the dogma requires it, as, especially, in the doctrine 
of the creation and providential guidance of the world. Maimonides holds firmly to the be- 
lief (without which, in his opinion, the doctrines o7 inspiration and of miracles as suspensions 
of natural laws could not be maintained), that God called into existence out of nothing, not 
only the form, but also the matter of the world, the philosophical proofs to the contrary not 
appearing to him conclusive. If these proofs possessed mathematical certainty, it would be 
necessary to interpret those passages in the Bible which appear to oppose them allegori- 
cally—which is now not admissible. Accordingly, Maimonides condemns the hypothesis 
of the eternity of the world in the Aristotelian sense, or the doctrine that matter is eternal 
ab initio, and has always been the substratum of an order or form arising from the tendency 
of all things to become like the eternal and divine Spirit; the Bible, he says, teaches the 
temporal origin of the world. Less discordant with the teachings of the Bible, according 
to M., is the Platonic theory, which he interprets with the strictest exactness according to 
the literal sense of the dialogue Timaeus (which he might have read in an Arabic translation). 


428 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 


He understands the theory as assuming that matter is eternal, but that the divinely-cansed 
order, by the addition of which to matter the world was formed, had a beginning in time. 
Yet he does not himself accept this theory, but adheres to the belief that matter was 
created by God. In Ethics, Maimonides lays special stress on the freedom of the will. 
Every man has complete freedom, either to enter upon the way of goodness and piety, or 
to go in the ways of evil and wickedness. Do not, says Maimonides, allow thyself to be 
persuaded by fools that God predetermines who shall be righteous and who wicked. He 
who sins has only himself to blame for it, and he can do nothing better than speedily 
to change his course. God’s omnipotence has bestowed freedom on man, and his om- 
niscience foreknows man’s choice without guiding it. We should not choose the good, 
like children and ignorant people, from motives of reward or punishment, but we should 
do good for its own sake and from love to God; still, retribution does await the im- 
mortal soul in the future world.—The resurrection of the body is treated by Maimonides 
as being simply an article of faith, which is not to be opposed, but which also cannot be 
explained. 

The presupposition of Maimonides that there exists a kind of knowledge independent 
of faith, to which, in so far as it possesses complete certainty, the literal sense of Scrip- 
ture must be sacrificed by means of allegorical interpretation, appeared to some of the 
Rabbis to be an inadmissible limiting of the authority of the biblical revelation; it was a 
“selling of Holy Scripture to the Greeks,” or a “destroying of firm ground.” His inter 
pretation of the sensuous representations of the Godhead and of the future life, which the 
Bible contains, and of some of the miracles, and his attempt to find rational grounds for 
the Jewish laws, were regarded by them as jeopardizing religion. In France there were 
fanatics who did not content themselves with anathemas, but who claimed and obtained 
the aid of Christian inquisitors against the detested heresy. But this very step, this trea- 
son committed against the national spirit of the Jews, contributed materially to the 
triumph of the rationalizing tendency of Maimonides, whose works soon obtained an 
almost unresisted authority among the Jews, not only of the East, but also of the West. 
They were also highly esteemed by Arabian and Christian thinkers. 

Among the numerous Jewish philosophers, who figured for the most part as translators 
and commentators of Aristotle and of Arabian disciples of Aristotle, the most noteworthy 
are, in the thirteenth century, Schem Tob ben Joseph ibn Falaquera, the commentator of 
the Moreh Nebuchim and translator of the extracts from Ibn Gebirol’s Fountain of Life, 
and, in the fourteenth century, Levi ben Gerson (born in 1288, died 1344), and Moses, the 
son of Joshua, of Narbonne, called Master Vidal. The former of these men was a partisan 
of the doctrine of Ibn Roschd. He adopted the Aristotelian theory of the formation of the | 
world by God out of a material substance previously existing, which substance, however, 
as being absolutely formless, was nothing, and explained the immortality of the soul as 
consisting in its union with the active intellect, in which each soul, according to the degree 
of its perfection, participated. Moses, the son of Joshua, wrote the commentary (men- 
tioned above, p. 421) on the Moreh of Maimonides and other commentaries on the works 
of Arabian philosophers, still extant in MSS. 

The work in imitation of the Moreh by Ahron ben Elia, of Nicomedia (a Karaite whe 
lived in the fourteenth century) and entitled the ‘Tree of Life” (which contains also 
detailed accounts respecting the religious and philosophical schools among the Arabs), is a 
presentation, on a philosophical basis, of the dogmas of Mosaism. 

From the fifteenth century onward the renewed Platonism (which is to be treated of 
hereafter) exerted a certain influence on the philosophy of the Jews, as may be seen in the 
dialogues concerning Love, by Leo the Hebrew, the son of Isaac Abrabanel. 








THE REVOLUTION IN SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY—ABOUT 1200. 429 


SECOND DIVISION. 


Tse Perriop or THE Fut, DEevELopMENT AND UNIVERSAL SWAY OF 
THE Scuoxtastic Puitosopuy. 


§ 98. The introduction into Europe of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 
Physics, Psychology and Ethics, and of the partly Neo-Platonic, 
partly Aristotelian writings of Arabian and Jewish philosophers, led 
to a material extension and transformation of philosophical studies 
among the Christian Scholastics. The theosophical doctrine of ema- 
nation contained in some of those works, and especially in certain 
books which were at first falsely attributed to Aristotle, but which 
were in fact the work of Neo-Platonists, favored, in connection with 
the doctrines of John Scotus Erigena, a leaning toward pantheistic 
doctrines. But a powerful ecclesiastical reaction soon took place, 
which at first threatened to operate not only against these doctrines, 
but also against the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle, but which 
afterward, when the theistic character of the genuine works of Aris- 
totle became known, assisted his doctrine to obtain a decided triumph 
and to force the Platonism of the earlier Scholastics, which they de- 
rived from Augustine and other Church Fathers, into the background. 
The prevalence of the Aristotelian, Arabian, and Jewish doctrines of 
monotheism in the philosophy of the later Scholastics had for a conse- 
quence the complete accomplishment of the till then imperfect sepa- 
ration of natural from revealed theology, the doctrine of the Trinity, 
in the philosophical justification of which Church Fathers and earlier 
Scholastics had found the principal aim of their philosophical think- 
ing, being now maintained on the ground of revelation alone, and 
withdrawn, as a theological mystery, from the sphere of philosophical 
speculation, while the belief in the existence of God was philosophi-. 
eally justified by Aristotelian arguments. Through an extensive 
appropriation, and in part also through a modification of the doctrines 
of Aristotle to suit the demands of the Church, the Scholastic phi- 
xosophy became, both materially and formally, for the fundamental 
theses contained in the “ theologia naturalis,” and formally, for the 
mysteries reserved to mere faith, the adequate instrument of eccle- 
siastical theology. This it continued to be until after the renewal of 


420 ΤῊΝ REVOLUTION IN SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY—ABOUT 1200. 


Nominalism, when the Scholastic postulate of the harmony of the 
substance of faith with reason—which postulate, however, from the 
time when Aristotelianism became dominant, in the thirteenth cen- 
tury, had never been affirmed in its full sense, except as applying to 
the fundamental theses above mentioned—became more and more 
restricted, and was at last altogether rejected. 


Of the introduction of the Scholastics to the knowledge of the physical, metaphysical, and ethical works 
of Aristotle (and also to the writings of the Arabian and Jewish commentators) A. Jourdain treats, in his 
Recherches critiques sur Cage et Vorigine des traductions latines d’ Aristote, Paris, 1819, 2. éd., 1848, 
German translation by Stahr, Halle, 1831; ef. Renan, Averr., Paris, 1852, pp. 148 and 158 seq., 228 seq. On 
the first reception given to these writings, see Hauréau, in his Ῥλέϊ. Scoi., I. p. 391 seq.; οἷς, also, Hauréan, 
Le concile de Paris de Vannée 1210, in the Revue archéol., new series, vol. 10, Paris, 1864, pp. 417-434. 


The question as to when and in what way the Scholastics became acquainted with the 
works of Aristotle, except the Organon, has been answered by the investigations of Am. 
Jourdain, who has shown that their first acquaintance with these works was brought 
about through the Arabians, but that not long afterward the Greek text was brought to 
the West (particularly from Constantinople) and translated directly into Latin. In former 
times the prevalent (and, substantially, the correct) belief was, that the Latin translations 
had been made from the Arabian; but in numerous cases critics forgot to distinguish suffi- 
ciently between the case of the logical writings, which had been known earlier, and the 
other writings of Aristotle, and they paid too little attention to the fact of the gradual 
addition of direct translations from the Greek. Heeren (in his Gesch. des Studiwms der 
class. Litt., I. p. 183) fell into the opposite mistake of under-estimating the agency of the 
Arabs. Buhle (Lehrb. der Gesch. der Philos., V. p. 247) guards the proper mean by direct- 
ing attention especially to the difference between the case of the Organon and that of the 
other works, but without investigating and communicating the documentary proofs subse- 
quently given by Jourdain. That the Organon, however, was not fully known until the 
middle of the twelfth century, and that before that time the Scholastics were acquainted 
with the Categ. and Interpr., together with the Isagoge and the works of Boéthius, was 
first discovered after Jourdain’s investigations by Cousin, Prantl, and others. 

The influence of Arabian science was felt sporadically in the early days of Christian 
Scholasticism. Gerbert in Spain had drawn upon it to a certain extent, although (as Bi- 
dinger has shown in his work Ueber Gerberts wiss. und polit. Stellung, Marburg, 1851) he did 
not understand the Arabic language (and probably not the Greek). Constantinus Afri- 
canus, a monk, who lived about A. p. 1050 and journeyed in the East, and afterward estab- 
lished himself in the monastery of Montecassino, translated from the Arabic various, and 
especially medical, works, among which were the works of Galenus and Hippocrates, by 
which the teachings of William of Conches appear to have been influenced. Soon after 1100 
Adelard of Bath made himself acquainted with some of the performances of the Arabs, 
from which he borrowed several theses in natural philosophy. About 1150, by command 
of Raimund, Archbishop of Toledo, Johannes Avendeath (Johannes ben David, Johannes 
Hispalensis) and Dominicus Gundisalvi translated, from the Arabic through the Castilian 
into Latin, the principal works of Aristotle and certain physical and metaphysical writings 
of Avicenna, Algazeli, and Alfarabi, as also the ‘‘Fountain of Life” of Avicebron (Ibn 
Gebirol). The work entitled ‘‘ De Causis” (also called De causis causarum, De intelligentiis, 
De esse, De essentia purae bonitatis) on which David the Jew wrote a commentary, and which 
was a compilation of Neo-Platonic theses, became widely circulated soon after 1150, ina 











THE REVOLUTION IN SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY—ABOUT 1200. 431 


Latin translation, as a work of Aristotle, and had an important influence in determining 
the method of Alanus. The Theologia (also called De secretiore Aegyptiorum philosophia), 
falsely ascribed to Aristotle, was known in a Latin translation at least as early as 1200, 
and perhaps still earlier. It was partly owing to the existence and influence of this wor’s 
that at first Neo-Platonic doctrines were admitted among the Scholastics under the authority 
of Aristotle. Probably this work, as also the De Causis and Avicebron’s Fons Vitae, were 
influential in determining the doctrine of Amalrich of Bena (who seems only to have taught 
orally) and his pupils, although the essence of his doctrine was undoubtedly derived from 
Scotus Erigena (as is clearly demonstrated by the reports of Henry of Ostia—in his Lectura 
sive apparatus super quinque libris decretalium, printed in 1512, ad I. 1, 2, and copied by 
Tennemann, by Krénlein, and by Huber, in his Scotus Erigena, Munich, 1861, p. 435 seq.— 
and of Martinus Polonus, Chron., 1V., copied by Huber, p. 437, and by Hauréau, Ph. Sc., 
I. 412). Soon after the death of Amalrich (which took place in the year 1206 or 1207) it 
became known that his heresy was not confined to the proposition which he had openly 
taught and which he had finally been forced to recant, viz.: that every believer must 
regard himself as a member of the body of Christ, but that it rested on a pantheistic basis 
and was connected with the many-branched heresy, which was then threatening the exist- 
ence of the Church and with which the ‘ Eternal Gospel” (composed about A. D. 1200 by 
Joachim of Flores, Abbot of Calabria, and a good Catholic, of whom Ernest Renan treats 
in the Rev. des deux Mondes, Vol. 64, July, 1866, pp. 94-142), and also still later, mystical 
works (in particular, the Evangeliwm Sancti Spiritus of the Fratricelli, composed by John 
of Parma, who lived 1210-1289) were in many respects tainted. God the Father—so 
some of the Amalricans taught—became man in Abraham, and the Son became man in 
Christ, who had abrogated the Jewish law. But now the time of the Holy Ghost had been 
introduced, who had become incarnate in themselves and had abrogated also the institu- 
tions and sacraments of the Church, and substituted knowledge and love in the place of 
faith and hope. Not works, but the will and spirit, are decisive; he who abides in love 
does not sin. This heresy was exterminated by fire and imprisonment, and the study of 
the physical works of Aristotle, in so far as they seemed to favor the heresy, as also of 
the works of Erigena, was prohibited by ecclesiastical decrees. In the year 1209 the Pro- 
vincial Council, assembled at Paris under the presidency of Peter of Corbeil, Archbishop 
of Sens, ordered, among other things, that neither the books of Aristotle on natural phi- 
losophy, nor commentaries on the same, should be read, whether publicly or secretly, at 
Paris (nec libri Aristotelis de naturali philosophia nec commenta legantur Parisiis publice vel 
secreto). The historian Rigordus, or rather his continuator, Guillaume le Breton, reports 
(inexactly) that the metaphysical writings of Aristotle (and it was to these that David of 
Dinant really appealed), which had shortly before been brought from Constantinople and 
translated from Greek into Latin, had been burned and the study of them prohibited, be- 
cause they had given occasion to the Amalrican heresy. The continuator of the chronicle 
of Robert of Auxerre says, not of the Metaphysics, but of the Physics of Aristotle (libri 
Aristotelis, qui de naturali philosophia inscripti sunt), that the reading of it was forbidden by 
the Council (in 1209) for three years; the same is related by Ceesarius of Heisterbach, who only 
names libros naturales. From this it might seem that in 1212 the’ prohibition was removed. 
Yet in the statutes of the University of Paris, which were sanctioned in the year 1215 by 
Robert of Courcon, the papal legate, the study of the Aristotelian books on dialectic, both the 
“ old” and the ‘‘new” books (ὦ. 6.,) the parts of the Logic of Aristotle which were previously 
known and those which first became known about A. D. 1140) is ordered, while the study 
of the works of Aristotle on metaphysics and on natural philosophy, as also of the com- 
pendia of their contents, and of the doctrines of David of Dinant, Amalmch, and Mauritius, 


432 THE REVOLUTION IN SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY—ABOUT 1200. 


the Spaniard (by whom some conjecture that Averroés is intended, Mauritius being regarded 
as a corrupted form of Mauvitius, a name sometimes given to Averroés) is forbidden. The 
Ethica remained unprohibited, but exerted in the following decade only an inconsiderable 
influence. By a bull of February 23, 1225, Pope Honorius III. commanded the burning 
of all copies of the work of Erigena entitled περὶ φύσεως μερισμοῦ. In April, 1231, Pope 
Gregory IX. directed that the libri naturales, forbidden by the Provincial Council for a 
specific reason (which reason, according to Roger Bacon, was that these books contained 
the doctrine of the eternity of the world), should not be used until they had been examined 
and purified from all suspicion of error. From this limiting clause, and from the fact that 
at about this same time all the works of Aristotle, including the Physics, began to be 
expounded by the most esteemed doctors of the Church, and that in 1254, at Paris, the 
Metaph. and Phys. were officially included in the list of subjects to be taught by the 
Facultas Artiwm, we may infer that the Scholastic theologians had learned gradually to dis- 
tinguish the genuine Aristotle from the Platonizing expositions of him, and had perceived 
that it was precisely the metaphysical basis of the dreaded heresy, namely, the hyposta- 
tizing of the universal, which was most vigorously combated by Aristotle. Roger Bacon 
expressly testifies that the ecclesiastical prohibition remained only in force until 1237. 
The doctrine of Aristotle acquired the greatest authority in the following time, when it 
was customary to draw a parallel between him, as the “praecursor Christi in naturalibus,” 
with John the Baptist, as the “praecursor Christi in gratuitis.” (How great his authority 
was in the latter portion of the Middle Ages, is shown, among other things, by the litera- 
ture of the ‘ auctoritates” or ‘ dicta notabilia,” of which Prantl treats in the Sitzungsber. der 
Miinchener Akad. der Wiss., 1867, 11. 2, pp. 173-198.) Even before the judgment of the 
Church had become more favorable, the Emperor Frederick II. caused the works of Aris- 
totle, together with Arabian commentaries (especially those of Averroés), to be translated 
into Latin, in Italy, under the superintendence of Michael Scotus and Hermannus Aleman- 
nus, with Jewish assistance. The whole body of the works of Aristotle was at hand from 
about A. D. 1210 to 1225 in Latin translations from the Arabic (Am. Jourdain, Rech. crit., 
2d ed., Paris, 1843, p. 212). Subsequently Robert Greathead and Albertus Magnus, among 
others, and, in particular, Thomas Aquinas, labored to secure purer texts founded on direct 
translations from the Greek, while Thomas of Cantimpré, William of Moerbeka, Henry of 
Brabant (the latter in about the year 1271, and in consequence of a request from Thomas 
Aquinas) and others, did good service as translators. 

While the application of dialectic to theology had been already in the first period a 
characteristic of Scholastic philosophy, it was not until the second period that the dialectic 
method of exposition, as adopted by the Scholastic philosophers, reached its highest de- 
velopment. The means by which this development was attained, were the study of the 
Aristotelian logic and metaphysics and the practice of Scholastic disputation. The method 
consisted, first, in connecting the doctrines to be expounded, with a commentary on some 
work chosen for the purpose. The contents of this work were divided and subdivided 
until the separate propositions, of which it was composed, were reached. Then these 
were interpreted, questions were raised with reference to them, and (for the most part in 
strictly syllogistic form) the grounds for affirming and for denying them were presented. 
Finally the decision was announced, and in case this was affirmative, the grounds for the 
negative were confuted, or, in the opposite case, the grounds for the affirmative. The 
names of the persons holding the various opinions which were discussed, were, aS a rule, 
not given. No opinions were defended during this period, which were altogether original 
and were not supported by some authority. (The truth of this latter statement, in what 
belongs to the province of logic, has been demonstrated in detail by Prantl.) 





ALEXANDER OF HALES, BONAVENTURA, AND OTHERS. 433 


§ 99. Alexander of Hales (died 1245) was the first Scholastic who 
was acquainted with the whole philosophy of Aristotle, and also with | 
a part of the Commentaries of the Arabian philosophers, and who 
employed the same in the service of Christian theology. He did not, 
however (like Albertus Magnus), treat systematically of the separate 
branches of philosophy as such, but merely made use in his Summa 
Theologiae of philosophical doctrines for the demonstration of theo- 
logical dogmas. William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris (died 1249), 
defended the Platonic theory of ideas and the doctrine of the substan- 
tiality of the human soul against Aristotle and Arabian Aristotelians. 
As a Christian, he identified the whole complex of Ideas with the 
second person of the Godhead. Robert Greathead, Bishop of Lincoln 
(died 1252), combined Platonic with Aristotelian doctrines. Michael 
Scotus is of importance in the history of philosophy, more as a 
translator of the works of Aristotle than as an original author. 
The learned Vincentius of Beauvais (died 1264), was rather an ency- 
clopedist than a philosopher. Bonaventura (died 1274), the mystical 
philosopher and scholar of Alexander of Hales, gave to the teachings 
of Plato (as transformed by the Neo-Platonists and Church Fathers) 
the preference over those of Aristotle, but subordinated all human 
wisdom to divine illumination. There is greater merit, according to 
Bonaventura, in the fulfillment of the monastic vows than in com- 
mon morality, and the highest point which the human soul can 
reach is mystical contemplation, which affords a foretaste of future 
blessedness. 

The Summa Universae Theologiae of Alexander of Hales was first printed at Venice in 1475, then at 
Nuremberg in 1482, Venice, 1576, ete. 

The Works of William of Auvergne were published at Venice in 1591, and more accurately and com- 
pletely by Blaise Leferon, at Orleans, in 1674. 

The Swnmary of the eight books of Aristotle’s Physics, by Robert Greathead of Lincoln, was printed 
at Venice in 1498 and 1500, and at Paris in 1538; his Commentary on the Anal. Post., at Venice several 
times, and at Padua in 1497. Cf., concerning him, Reinhold Pauli, Bischaf Grosseteste und Adam von 
Marsh, Tabingen ( Univ.-Schrift), 1864. 

Michael Scotus’s Super Autorem Spherae was printed at Bologna in 1495, and at Venice in 1631, his De 
Sole et Luna at Strasburg in 1622, and his De Chiromantia repeatedly in the fifteenth century. 

Vincentius of Beauvais’ Speculwm Quadruplew: Naturale, Doctrinale, Historiale, Morale, was 
published at Venice in 1494, and Duaci 1624, the Speculum Nat. et Doctrinale, Strasburg, 1473, and, with 
the #Htstor., Nuremberg, 1486. Cf., on him, a work by Christoph Schlosser, published at Frankfort-on- 
the-Main, in 1819, Aloys Vogel, Univ.-Pr., Freiburg, 1843, and Prantl, Gesch. der Logik, 111. pp. Ti-85. The 
“Mirror of Doctrine” was composed, according to Al. Vogel, about a. p. 1250, the “Mirror of History ἡ 
about 1254; the ‘ Mirror of Morals” was not written by Vincentius, but by a later author, between 1310 
and 1320; this work, at least, contains later interpolations; but even the other parts are, according to 
Prantl’s belief (Gesch. der Log., 111. 87), not free from interpolations (which are found nevertheless in 
MSS. of the fourteenth century). 

The writings of Bonaventura were printed at Strasburg in 1482, Rome, 1588-96, ete. Bonaventuras 


opera, ed. A. C, Peltier, Besangon et Paris, 1861, etc. Bonuvent, opuse. duo praestantissima: Brevilog. 


28 


484 ALEXANDER OF HALES, BONAVENTURA, AND OTHERS, 


et Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, ed. Car. Jos. Hefele, 3d edition, Tibingen, 1862. Of him treat especially 
W. A. Hollenberg (Studien zu Bonaw., Berlin, 1862; Bon. als Dogmatiker, in Theol. Stud. u. Krit., 1868, 
Heft 1, pp. 95-180), and Berthaumier (@esch. des heiligen Bonav. ins Deutsche iibersetet, Regensburg, 
1863); cf. the proper sections in the works above (p. 889) cited on Medieval Mysticism. 


The Summa Theologiae of Alexander of Hales—who was born in the county of Glou- 
cester, joined the Franciscan Oraer, and studied and taught at Paris, where he died in 
1245—is a syllogistical demonstration of ecclesiastical dogmas, following, though not 
servilely, in part the Sentences of Hugo of St. Victor, and in part—more especially in its 
arrangement—the similar work by Peter the Lombard. His work, however, is not the 
first which bore the title of a Swmma of theological doctrines, since before him Swmmae 
had been written by Robert of Melun and Stephen Langton, and, still earlier, William of 
Auxerre had composed an ‘‘ Explanatio in quatuor sententiarum libros,” which was printed 
at an early date at Paris. But while earlier Scholastics had known only the Logic of Aris- 
totle, and William of Auxerre, yielding to the commands of the Church, had ignored the 
Physics and Metaphysics (he only mentions, in addition to the Logic, the Ethics of Aristotle), 
Alexander of Hales first used the entire philosophy of Aristotle as an auxiliary of theology 
in his, for the rest, strictly orthodox and papally recommended Commentary. Of the Ara- 
bians, he notices, in particular, Avicenna, and rarely Averroés. Alexander of Hales is a 
Realist. Yet he regards the Universalia ante rem as being in the mind of God: ‘“‘mundum 
intelligibilem nuncupavit Plato ipsam rationem sempiternam, qua fecit Deus mundum.” They 
do not exist as independent essences apart from God. They constitute the causa exemplaris 
of things; yet they are not distinct from the causa efficiens, but are identical with it in 
God. The Universale in re is the form of things (as Alexander assumes in agreement with 
Gilbert de la Porrée). Alexander’s pupils honored him with the title of Doctor Irrefraga- 
bilis. The Summa was finished after his death by his scholars, about a. Ὁ. 1252. Alex- 
ander of Alexandria, who likewise belonged to the Franciscan Order, wrote the Glossae to 
the Aristotelian Metaphysics, which were printed at Venice in 1572, and were sometimes 
ascribed to Alexander of Hales. A pupil of Alexander of Hales, and his successor in the 
Franciscan chair of instruction at Paris, was John of Rochelle, who gave special attention 
to psychology. 

~Wiltiama—of _Anvergne, born at Aurillac, teacher of theology at Paris and Bishop of 
Paris fror 1228 onward (died in 1249), wrote works entitled De Universo and De Anima, 
which were based in large measure on Aristotle, to whom, however, he only conceded 
such authority as was consistent with the truth of ecclesiastical dogma. He also refers 
frequently, though for the most part only for the purpose of combating them, to the doc- 
trines of Alfarabi, Avicenna, Algazel, Avicebron, Averroés, and others. In his ideology 
and cosmology William of Auvergne follows Plato, whom, however, he knew only through 
the Timaeus and Phaedo. Just as we are forced, on the ground of certain sense-perceptions, 
to believe in the existence of material objects, as perceived by us through the senses, so 
must we, in view of the facts of intellectual cognition, recognize the existence of intelligible 
objects, which are reflected in our intellects (De Univ., 11. 14). The ‘archetypal world” 
(mundus archetypus) is God’s Son and true God (De Univ., II. 17). In order to know the 
intelligible, there is no need of an active Intellect external to us and separated from our 
souls. Our intellects belong to our souls; and the latter exist independently of the body, 
as separate substances, having need of the body as an instrument for the exercise of sen- 
sual functions, but by no means as a condition of their existence; the soul is related to its 
vody, as the cithern-player to his cithern (De Anima, V. 23). 

Robert Greathead (Robertus Capito, Grosseteste), born at Strodbrook, in the county of 
Suffolk, educated at Oxford and Paris, for a time Chancellor of the University of Oxford, 








ALEXANDER OF HALES, BONAVENTURA, AND OTHERS. 435 


intimately connected with the Franciscans, and a violent opponent of the Pope, died in 


1253 while Bishop of Lincoln. He wrote commentaries on various works of Aristotle and | 


also on the mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. He distinguishes three kinds of 


form: 1) form immanent in matter, which the Physicist considers; 2) that form which is | 
abstracted by the understanding and is considered by the mathematician; and 3) immaterial | 


form, which the metaphysician considers. Among the forms which are in themselves 
immaterial and not simply separated in reflection from matter, he reckons, beside God and 
the Soul, the Platonic Ideas. 

Michael Scotus (born in 1190), who translated the De Coelo and De Anima of Aristotle, 
together with the Commentaries of Averroés, and other works, was regarded as a learned 
but heterodox philosopher. He wrote on astrology and alchemy, but his principal merit lay 
in his translations. 

Vincentius of Beauvais, a Dominican and teacher of the sons of Saint Louis, contributed 
materially, by his comprehensive, compiled work, in which he touched, among other sub- 
jects, upon philosophy, to the furtherance of encyclopedical studies in the Middle Ages, 
He often cites Albertus Magnus, and sometimes even Thomas. 

John Fidanza, born at Balneoregium (Bagnaréa in Tuscany) in the year 1221, was sur- 
named Bonaventura by Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, who 
performed on him a miraculous cure in his youth, and became in his twenty-second year 
a Franciscan and afterward (1256) the General of the Order. He was a pupil of Alexander 
of Hales from 1243 to 1245, then of John of Rochelle, and, from 1253 on, the successor of 
the latter in the professorial chair. He died in 1274, and was canonized in 1482. His 
revering admirers named him ‘ Doctor Seraphicus.” Bonaventura developed further the 
mystical doctrine begun by Bernard of Clairvaux on the basis furnished by Dionysius 
Areopagita, and continued by Hugo and Richard of St. Victor and others. He was some- 
what affected by the influence of Aristotelianism, but, after the manner of the earlier 
Scholastics, in all questions which rose above mere dialectic, followed by preference 
Plato in the sense in which the latter was then understood, 7. e., as interpreted by Augus- 
tine. Bonaventura affirms that, according to Plato, God was not only the beginning and 
end of all things, but also their archetypal ground (ratio exemplaris); but this latter doc- 
trine, he adds, was disputed by Aristotle with arguments possessing no force. (This 
judgment indicates that Bonaventura falsely identified the theory of the hypostatical 
nature of the Ideas—which Aristotle disputed—with the doctrine of their existence in 
God, which latter doctrine, however, was first advanced several centuries later by Philo, 
whose point of departure was the Jewish conception of God, and by the Neo-Platonists 
and Christian philosophers, who arrived at it by a theological transformation of the theory 
ofideas.) Bonaventura adds, further, that from this error of Aristotle arose another, that, 
namely, of ascribing to God no providential care of earthly things, since he had not in him- 
self the “ideas,” by which he could be cognizant of them (whence it appears that Bona- 
ventura conceived the Platonic ideas, which Aristotle opposed, as thoughts of the divine 
mind). Further, Bonaventura censures the blindness of Aristotle in holding the world to 
be eternal and in opposing Plato, who, conformably to truth, assigned a beginning to the 
world and to time. But all human wisdom, even that of Plato, appears to him as folly in 
comparison with mystical illumination. As regards his ethical doctrine, especial importance 
belongs to Bonaventura’s defence of the genuine Christian character of the monastic prin- 
ciple of poverty, and of mendicancy as a means of obtaining the necessaries of life—a 
principle on which the Franciscans, more than any other order of monks, laid stress. The 
(Aristotelian) ethical principle of the right mean between the too much and the too little 
is valid, he says, only in common life; but that type of life which is ordered according te 


ες... 


480 ALBERTUS MAGNUS. 


the counsels of the Gospel, the vita supererogationis, to which poverty and chastity belong, 
is of a higher order. Bonaventura does not hold every Christian to be bound to the imita- 
tion of Christ in all things, but distinguishes three stages of Christian perfection: the 
observance of the requirements of the law, the fulfillment of the spiritual counsels of the 
Gospel and the enjoyment of eternal happiness in contemplation, and he regards the 
attainment of the higher stages as reserved to ascetics. The mystical work of Bonaven- 
tura, entitled Soliloquium, a dialogue between man and his soul. is in imitation of Hugo, 
and the Itinerarium mentis in Dewm, in imitation of Richard of St. Victor; in his Medita- 
tions on the Life of Jesus, written in a style at once popular and mystical, Bonaventura 
follows more especially Bernard. 


§ 100. Albert of Bollstadt, born at Lauingen in Swabia, in the year 
1193, educated at Paris and Padua, a Dominican teacher at Paris 
and Cologne, and from 1260 to 1262 Bishop of Regensburg, died at 
Cologne 1280, and was called, on account of his extensive learning 
and great talent as an instructor, “the Great” (Albertus Magnus) 
and “ Doctor Universalis.” He was the first Scholastic who repro- 
duced the whole philosophy of Aristotle in systematic order, with 
constant reference to the Arabic commentators, and who remodeled 
it to meet the requirements of ecclesiastical dogma. The Platonisra 
and Neo-Platonism, which in the earlier periods of Scholasticism had 
been predominant in all those parts of philosophy which went beyond 
logic (so far as these were at all cultivated at that time), were not 
indeed wholly removed from them by Albert. On the contrary, they 
exercised a not inconsiderable influence on his own philosophical 
speculations, but through the greater influence of the Aristotelian 
order of ideas were forced into the background. Albert was ac- 
quainted with a number of Platonic and Neo-Platonic writings; all 
of the works of Aristotle were accessible to him in Latin translations 
from the Arabic, and a few of them in translations from the Greek. 
In a series of works, consisting of commentaries on the works of 
Aristotle and paraphrases of the same, Albert set forth the doctrines 
‘of Aristotle, as modified to meet the views of the Church. The uni- 
versal exists, according to him, in a threefold sense: 1) as wneversale 
ante rem, in the mind of God, according to the Neo-Platonic and 
Augustinian teaching, 2) as wniversale in re, according to the doc- 
trine of Aristotle; and 3) as wniversale post rem, by which Albert 
understands the subjective concept, in which alone Nominalism and 
Conceptualism had admitted the existence of the universal. In 
speculative theology Albert separates strictly, in all cases, the doc- 
trine of the Trinity and the dogmas connected with it from rational 
or philosophical theology, in which particular he was followed by 











“παν 





ALBERTUS MAGNUS. 437 


Thomas. He taught, in agreement with the doctrine of the Church, 
that the creation of the world was an act in time, rejecting the Aris- 
totelian theory of the eternal subsistence of the world. In psychology, 
his most important modification of the Aristotelian teaching was his 
uniting of the lower psychical faculties with that substance separate 
from the body which Aristotle termed the Nous, bodily organs being 
necessary, according to Albert, not to the existence of these faculties, 
but only to their activity in the earthly life. The Ethics of Albert 
rests on the principle of the freedom of the will. With the cardinal 
virtues of the ancients he combines the Christian virtues, as virtues 
of equal rank. 


The Works of Albertus Magnus were published in twenty-one folio volumes by Petr. Jammy, Lyons, 
1651, his Phys. and Metaph., Venice, 1518, per M. Ant. Zimarium, De Coelo, i)., 1519. Of him treat Ra- 
dolphus Noviomagensis (De Vita Alb. Magn., Cologne, 1499) and others, and, in more recent times, 
Joachim Sighart (Albertus Magnus, sein Leben und seine Wissenschaft, Regensburg, 1857) and others; ef. 
F. J. von Bianco, Die alte Universitat Koln, Part I.,1855—in which work, among other things, a biography 
of Alb. is contained—and M. Joél, Das Verhdltniss Alberts d. G. zu Moses Maimonides, Breslau, 1863 
(ef. above, ad § 97); Haneberg, Zur Erkenntnisslehre des Avicenna und Alb, M. (cf. above, p. 407); 
Prantl, Gesch. der Log., 111.. 89-107. Albert’s botanical work has been published by Jessen: Alderti 
Magni de vegetabilibus libri septem, historiae naturalis pars XVIII.: editionem criticam ab Ernesto 
Mey ocoeptam absolvit Carolus Jessen, Berlin, 1867. [O. d’Assailly, Albert le Grand, Paris, 1870.—7r.] 


The year of Albert's birth was, according to the more probable authority, 1193; 
others regard it as 1205. At Padua Albert studied philosophy, mathematics, and medi- 
cine, and there, in the year 1221, he was induced by Jordanus the Saxon to join the 
Dominican Order, after which he pursued his studies in theology at Bologna. Begin- 
ning in the year 1229, he taught philosophy during a series of years at Cologne and 
other places. In 1245 he began to teach at Paris, whence he subsequently returned to 
Cologne as a teacher of philosophy and theology. To the latter place, though repeatedly 
called away to fill various ecclesiastical offices, he always returned anew to his studies and 
his professorial occupations. He died at Cologne November 25, 1280. Albert is said to 
have developed slowly in his youth, and in his old age to have suffered from impaired 
faculties (‘‘ Albertus ex asino factus est philosophus et ex philosopho asinus”). Familiar as he 
was with the Aristotelian doctrine, the historical course of development of Greek philoso- 
phy in general remained unknown to him. He identifies Zeno the Eleatic with the 
founder of Stoicism, calls Plato and Speusippns Stoics, and the like. In knowledge of 
natural science he was distinguished above the most of his contemporaries. His works 
give evidence of his very extensive erudition; yet he often fails in power to control the 
results of his wide-spread investigations. In the spirit of system, in critical insight and 
clearness of thought, his pupil, Thomas Aquinas, was far superior to him. In Com- 
mentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius and in Minor works (De adhaerendo Deo, etc.) Albert trod 
also the ground of Mysticism. 

In the interpretation and presentation of the doctrines of Aristotle, Albert follows 
principally Avicenna. He mentions Averroés more rarely, and generally only for the 
purpose of opposing him; still, he follows him occasionally, especially in his commentary 
on the De Coelo. In many particulars he follows Maimonides, as one less removed than 
the Arabian philosophers from ecclesiastical orthodoxy, especially in disputing against the 
arguments for the eternity of the world. 


— 


ey 


488 ALBERTUS MAGNUS. 


While Anselm of Canterbury applies his principle ‘Credo, ut intelligam,” especially te 
the mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the incarnation (in the Cur Deus homo?), 
Albert, while searching constantly for rational arguments in support of the articles of 
faith, and for the fortification of believers, the direction of the ignorant, and the refutation 
of the unbelieving, yet excludes the specifically biblical and Christian doctrines of revelation 
from the sphere of things knowable by the light of reason (Summa Theol., Opp., Vol. XVII. 
p. 6: et ex lumine quidem connaturali non elevatur ad scientiam trinitatis et incarnationis et 
resurrectionis). He asserts (p. 32) as a reason for this, that the human soul has power only 
to know that, the principles of which it has in itself (anima enim humana nullius rei accipit 
scientiam nisi illius, cujus principia habet apud se ipsam), and since it finds itself to be a 
simple essence, containing no trinity of persons, it cannot conceive of the Godhead as 
tri-personal, except as illumined by the light of grace (nisi aliqua gratia vel illuminatione 
altioris luminis sublevata sit anima). Still Albert does not repudiate the Augustinian idea 
that natural things contain an image of the Trinity. 

Logic is defined by Albert (Opp., I. p. 5) as a speculative science, teaching us how to pass 
from the known to the knowledge of the unknown (sapientia contemplativa docens qualiter 
et per quae devenitur per notum ad ignoti notitiam). He divides it into the doctrine of In- 
complexa, or uncombined elements, in regard to which it is possible only to inquire after 
the essence, which is denoted by their definition, and of complexa, or combinations of these 
elements, in connection with which the different modes of inferring are treated of. Phi- 
losophia prima or Metaphysics treats of that which %s, as such, according to its most 
universal predicates, as which Albert designates, in particular, unity, reality, and goodness 
(quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum, Opp., XVII. p. 158). Albert affirms the reality of 
the universal, because, if the universal were not real, it could not with truth be predicated 
of real objects. It could not be known if it did not exist in reality; it does exist as 
form, for in its form lies the entire being of an object. There are three classes of forms, 
and hence three modes of existence of the universal: 1) before the individuals, in the 
divine mind, 2) im the individuals, as the one in the many, and 3) after the individuals, 
as a result of abstraction, performed by us in thought (De Natura et Origine Anime Tr., 
I, 2: et tune resultant tria formarum genera: unum quidem ante rem existens, quod est causa 
formativa; aliud autem est ipsum genus formarum, quae fluctuant in materia; tertium autem 
est genus formarum, quod abstrahente intellectu separatur a rebus). 

The universal per se is an eternal emanation from the divine intelligence. It does not 
exist independently out of the divine mind. The form present in material things, con- 
sidered as the end of development (jinis generationis vel compositionis substantiae desideratae 
a materia), is termed by Albert their reality (actus), but considered as including the full 
being of the object (totwm esse ret), it is termed their quiddity (quidditas). The principle of 
individuation is to be sought in matter, in so far as this is the bearer or substratum (sub- 
jectum, ὑποκείμενον) of forms. The particular form of each object depends on the nature 
and capacity of the matter of which it is composed (bid., I. 2). Matter contains in itself 
form potentially (potentia, it contains the potentia inchoationis formae, Summa Theol., 11. 
1, 4). Material generation or development is a process whose products are educed from 
matter (educi e materia) through the agency of an actually existing cause. Variety in 
material constitution is not the cause but the result of diversity of form (Phys., VIII. 1, 13); 
yut all individual plurality depends on the division of matter (in Metaph., XI. 1: indi- 
viduorum multitudo fit omnis per divisionem materiae). The matter of which any individual 
object (hoc aliguid) consists, is limited and distinguished by individuating accidents (termi- 
nata et signata accidentibus individuantibus). The particular is substantia prima, the universal 
is substantia secunda. The occasional denomination in Aristotle of the universal as a kind 





€ fee a 








Se 


ae ea 





ALBERTUS MAGNUS. 439 


of matter—which language it is difficult to reconcile with the doctrine that it is the form 
of a thing which constitutes its essence—is explained by Albert (in a manner similar to 
that in which Avicenna explains it) by the distinction of this matter, which is so called 
only in virtue of a logical usage, from real matter; he holds fast to the proposition, that 
the existence of the universal is formal and not material (De Jntellectu et Intelligibili, I. 2. 3: 
esse universale est formae et non materiae). The universal is an essence fitted to give being 
to a plurality of objects (essentia apta dare multis ese. Per hanc aptitudinem universale est 
in re extra). But its only actual existence is in the intellect. 

Albert teaches, with Aristotle, that those effects which are last in the order of reality 
are first in the order of our knowledge, and constitute its point of departure (the posteriora 
are priora quoad nos, Summa Theol., I. 1, 5). From the experimental knowledge of nature 
we must rise to the knowledge of God as the author of nature, and from the experience 
of grace we ascend to the comprehension of the grounds of faith (jides ex posterioribus 
crediti quaerit intellectum). It is not the ontological, but the cosmological argument, which 
makes us certain of God’s existence. God is not fully comprehensible to us, because the 
finite is not able to grasp the infinite, yet he is not altogether beyond our knowledge; our 
intellects are, as it were, touched by a ray of his light, and through this contact we are 
brought into communion with him (/0., I. 3, 13). God is the universally active intellect, 
which is constantly emitting intelligences from itself (De Caus. et Procr. Univ., 4.1: pri- 
mum principium est indeficientur fluens, quo intellectus universaliter agens indesinenter est 
intelligentias envittens). God is simple, but he is not for this reason (as held by David of 
Dinant) to be regarded as that which is most universal, and Hentified with the materia 
universalis ; for simple substances are distinguished from each other by themselves and not 
by constitutive differences. Nothing can belong in common to God and his creatures, and 
hence past and future eternity cannot belong to both. The world was not created out of a 
pre-existing matter—for God would be a being having need of something, if his working 
presupposed an already existing matter—but out of nothing. Time must have had a 
beginning, otherwise it would never have reached the present instant (Swmma Theol., II. 
1, 3). Creation is a miracle, and cannot be comprehended by the natural reason, whence 
- the philosophers never advance beyond the principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, which is applicable 
only to secondary causes and not to the first cause, and is of authority only in physics, and 
not in theology (Swmma de Creaturis, I. 1,1; Summa Theol., II. 1, 4). 

Only that whose existence is self-derived has by its very nature eternal being; every 
ereature is derived from nothing, and would therefore perish, if not upheld by the 
eternal essence of God (Summa Theol., 11. 1, 3). By virtue of its community with God, 
every human soul is an heir of immortality. The active Intellect is a part of the soul, for 
in every man it is the form-giving principle, in which other individuals cannot share 
(Intellectus agens est pars animae et forma animae, Metaph., XI. 1, 9). This same thinking 
and form-giving principle bears in itself the forces, which Aristotle calls the vegetative, 
sensitive, appetitive, and motive faculties, and hence these latter are, like the former, capa- 
ble of being separated from the body, and are immortal. To the refutation of the mono- 
psychism of Averroés, which, as Albert himself testifies, was then widely accepted, and 
which asserted the unity of the immortal spirit in the plurality of human souls that are 
constantly arising into existence and perishing, Albert, by command of Pope Alexander 
IV., consecrated, in about the year 1255, an especial treatise (De wnitate intellectus contra 
Averroistas, Opp., Vol. V. p, 218 seq.), which he afterward incorporated into his Summa 
Theol. (Opp., Vol. XVIII.); in it he opposes to thirty arguments, which might be advanced 
in favor of the Averroistic doctrine, thirty-six arguments of a contrary bearing. In his 
De Natura et Origine Animae (Opp., Vol. V. f. 182) and in his Commentary on the third 


440 THOMAS AQUINAS. 


book of Aristotle’s De Anima (Tr., 11. ch. 7) he returns to this same controversy. He 


designates the opinion combated by him as an “error completely absurd, most wicked, 
thoroughly reprehensible.” 


Between that which the reason recognizes as desirable, and that which natural pro- 
pensity desires, free will (liberum arbitrium) decides; through this decision desire is trans- 
formed into perfect will (perfecta voluntas). The law of reason (lex mentis, lea rationis et 
intellectus), which engages us to act or not to act, is conscience (conscientia); this is inborn 
and imperishable, in so far as it is the consciousness of the principles of action; it is 
acquired and variable in relation to_ single cases (unde lex mentis habitus naturalis est 
quantum ad principia, acquisitus quantum ad scita). Albert distinguishes from conscience 
the moral capacity, which he, like Alexander of Hales (after Jerome in his commen- 
tary on the vision of Kzekiel, I. 4-10: scintillae conscientiae, with reference to 1 Thess. 
i. 5), calls synteresis or synderesis; the former is a habitus (ἕξις), the latter only a potentia 
(δύναμις). Virtue he defines with Augustine as a quality of goodness in the mind, pro- 
ductive of right living and of no evil, and which God alone produces in man (bona qualitas 
mentis, qua recte vivitur, qua nullus male utitur, quam solus Deus in homine operatur). To the 
four cardinal virtues of the ancients and the Aristotelian virtues which were joined with 
them as ‘‘adjunct virtues,” he gives the name of “acquired virtues,” and adds to them, 
in imitation of Petrus Lombardus, the three theological or “infused” virtues: faith, hope, 
and love (Alb. Opp., XVIII. pp. 469-480). 


§ 101. Thomas of Aquino was the son of Landolf, Count of 
Aquino, and was born in 1225 or 1227 at the Castle of Roecasicca, 
near Aquino in the territory of Naples (ancient Arpinum). He 
received his first instruction from the monks of the Convent of Monte 
Cassino, and in early life was induced to enter the Dominican Order 
at Naples. He then continued his studies at Cologne and Paris, par- 
ticularly under the guidance of Albert the Great, and became after- 
ward a teacher of philosophy and theology at Cologne, Paris, Bologna, 
Naples, and other places. He died March 7, 1274, in the Cistercian 
Convent of Fossa Nuova, near Terracina, while on his journey from 
Naples to the Council of Lyons, and was canonized during the pon- 
tificate of John XXII. in the year 1898, He brought the Scholastic 
philosophy to its highest stage of development, by effecting the 
most perfect accommodation that was possible of the Aristotelian phi- 
losophy to ecclesiastical orthodoxy. He distinguished, however, the 
specitically Christian and ecclesiastical doctrines of revelation—which, 
in reply to the objections of their opponents, could only be shown by 
the reason to be free from contradiction and probable—from those 
doctrines which could be positively justified on rational grounds. 
Besides commentaries on works of Aristotle and numerous philo- 
sophical and theological monographs, he composed, in particular, the 
three following comprehensive works: the Commentary on the 








THOMAS AQUINAS. 441 


Sentences of Peter the Lombard, in which he discussed subjects of 
theological controversy; the four books of the De Veritate Fidei 
Catholicae contra Gentiles (composed later, in 1261 and 1264), con- 
taining a rational demonstration of theology; and, lastly, the (unfin- 
ished) Summa Theologiae, in which all revealed doctrines were to be 
systematically presented. Thomas agrees with Aristotle in regarding | 
knowledge, and pre-eminently the knowledge of God, as the supreme | 
end of human life. On the question of universals he is a realist, in 
the moderate Aristotelian sense. The universal, he teaches, is, in the} 
world of reality, immanent in the individual, being separated from it | 
only by the abstracting mind; but our conception of the universal is — 
not hereby rendered false, so long as we do not judge that the univer- — 
sal exists independently, but simply make it alone the subject of our | 
attention and judgment. But Thomas recognizes, besides the uni- 
versal in things or the Essence (the forma substantialis or qguidditas) 
and the universal after things, or the concept which we form by 
abstracting in thought the essential (the guédditas) from the acci- 
dental (or the unessential attributes, formae accidentales), a form in 
which the universal exists before things, viz.: as ideas in the divine 
mind, ὦ. ¢., as the thoughts which God, before the creation of the 
world, had of the things to be created ; it is only against the Platonic 
theory of ideas, as represented by Aristotle, that, in agreement with 
the latter, he assumes an attitude of decided opposition, rejecting as an 
idle fiction the hypothesis of ideas existing independently (separately), 
whether in things or in the divine mind. The existence of God is 
demonstrable only ὦ posteriori, namely, from the contemplation of 
the world as the work of God. There must be a first mover, or a 
first cause, because the chain of causes and effects cannot contain an 
infinite number of links. The order of the world presupposes an 
orderer. God exists as pure, immaterial form, as pure actuality, wholly 
free from potentiality ; he is the eflicient and final cause of the world. 
The world has not existed from eternity ; it was called into existence 
out of nothing by God’s almighty power at a determinate instant in 
time, with which instant time itself began. Yet the non-eternity of 
the world in the past is not strictly demonstrable on philosophical 
grounds, but only probable, and it is only made certain by revelation. 
The immortality of the soul follows from its immateriality, since a 
pure form can neither destroy itself nor, through the dissolution of a 
material substratum, be destroyed. Immateriality must be ascribed 


442 : THOMAS AQUINAS. 


to the human intellect from the very nature of the latter. For the 
intellect thinks the universal; but if it were a form inseparable from 
matter, like the soul of a brute, it could think only the individual, 
and not the universal. Immateriality, further, is an attribute of the 
whole soul, since the sensitive, appetitive, motive, and even vegeta- 
tive faculties, belong to that substance, which possesses the power of 
thought. The soul exercises the latter power without the aid of a 
bodily organ, whereas the lower functions can only be exercised by it 
through material organs. The human soul does not exist before the 
body. It does not acquire its knowledge through the recollection of 
ideas beheld in a pre-existent state, as Plato assumed. Nor does it 
possess innate conceptions. Its thinking rests on the basis of sensuous 
perceptions and of representative images, from which the active intel- 
lect abstracts forms. The will depends on the understanding; that 
which appears good, is necessarily sought after; but necessity arising 
from internal causes and reposing on knowledge, is freedom. In 
Ethics, Thomas adds to the natural virtues—in treating of which he 
combines Plato’s doctrine of the four cardinal virtues with the doc- 
trine of Aristotle—the supernatural or Christian virtues, namely, 
faith, love, and hope. 


The complete works of Thomas Aquinas were published at Rome in 1570, in seventeen folio volumes; 
at Venice in 1594, Antwerp, 1612, Paris, 1660, Venice, 1787, Parma, 1852, ete. The editions of single works, 
especially of the Swnma Theologiae, are extremely numerous. The source of information for his life is the 
Biography incorporated in the Acta Sanctorum VII. Mart., written by Gulielmus de Thoco, a contem- 
porary of Thomas, together with the Acta of the process of canonization. Of recent works on Thomas and 
his doctrine (many of which in the last few decades of years were occasioned by the Gtintherian philosophy 
and the Thomist-Scholastic reaction against it), it may suffice to mention the following: Hoértel, 7h. ὁ. A. 
und seine Zeit, Augsburg, 1846; Carle, Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de St. Thomas, 1846 ; Montet, Me- 
moire zur Thomas @ Aquwin, in the transactions of the Acad. des sc. morales, Vol. II., 1847, pp. 511-611 ; 
Ch. Jourdain, La philosophie de St. Thomas d’ Aquwin, Paris, 1858; Cacheux, De la philosophie de St. 
Thomas, Paris, 1858; Liberatore, Die Erkenntnisslehre des heiligen Thomas von Aquino, tibersezt von 
E. Franz, Mayence, 1861; Karl Werner, Der h. Thomas von Aquino, Regensburg, 1858, ete. (Vol. I.: Life 
and Writings; Vol. Il.: Doctrine; Vol. III.: History of Thomism), ef. Gaudin, Philosophia juxta 2. 
Thomae dogmata, new ed. by Roux Lavergne, Paris, 1861; (E. Plassman, Die Schule des h. Thomas von 
Aquino, Soest, 1857-62); Anton Rietter, Die Moral des h. Thomas von Aquino, Munich, 1858; Oischinger, 
Die speculative Theol. des Th. v. Aqu., Landshut, 1858, and Quaestiones controversae de philosophia 
scholastica, ibid., 1859; Aloys Schmid, Die thomistische und scotistische Gewissheitslehre, Dillingen, 
1859; Kuhn, Glauben und Wissen nach Thomas von Aquino, in the Tiib. theol. Quartalschrift, 1860, 
No.2; Heinr. Contzen, Th. von A. als volkswirthsch. Schriftsteller, ein Beitrag zur national-6konom. 
Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters, Leips. 1861; see the controversial works against the renewal of Thomism, 
such as those by Giinther and Gintherians, and by Frohschammer, Michelis, and others; Kuhn, Philosophie 
und Theologie, Tiibingen, 1860; οἵ, those sections in the works on the history of philosophy in the Middle 
Ages, by Tenneman, Ritter, Hauréau, and in the works on the history of dogmas and on Church history by 
Mohler, Neander, Baur, and others, which relate to this topic; Jellinek, Τὰ. von A.. in the Jid. Litt., 
Leipsic, 18538. In the Review entitled Der Katholik, a number of articles have been published in different 
years (1859 seq.) containing a critique from its (Thomistic) stand-point of the recent literature bearing on 
Thomas of Aquino, Jac. Merten, Ueber die Bedeutung der Erkenntnisslehre des heiligen Arugustinus 
und des heiligen Thomas von Aquino fiir den gesch. Entwicklungsgang der Philos. ale reiner Ver- 








THOMAS AQUINAS. 443 


nunftwiss., Treves, 1865. Albert Ritschl, Gesch. Studien zur christlichen Lehre von Gott, in the Jahrb. 
Siir deutsche Theol., X. pp. 211-918 (relating especially to the theology of Thomas and Scotus). Prantl, 
Gesch. der Logik, 111. pp. 107-118. 

Of the works of Thomas Aquinas which relate to philosophy, should be named (in sddition to the three 
larger ones above mentioned, viz.: the Commentary on the Sentences, the Summa contra Gentiles and 
Sunma Theol.), in particular, the following: Commentaries on Arist. de interpret., Anal poster., Metaph., 
Phys. Parva Naturalia, De Anima, Eth. Nic., Polit., Meteor, De Coelo et Mundo, De Gen. et Corr., and 
on the Liber de causis ; an early work entitled De Hnte et Hssentia, and numerous other minor treatises, 
such as De Principiv Individuutionis, De Proposit. Modalibus, De Fallaciis, De #ternitate Mundi, De 
Natura Muteriae, ete. Several other treatises are either insufficiently authenticated (De Natura Syllo- 
gismorum, De Inventione Medii, De Demonstratione, etc.) or are probably spurious (De Natura Acci- 
dentis, De Natura Generis, De Pluralitate Formarum, De Intellectu et Intelligibili, De Oniversalibus, 
etc.), 


The relation of philosophy to theology in the doctrine of Thomas is most distinctly 
expressed by him in the following words: “It is impossible for the natural reason to 
arrive at the knowledge of the divine persons. By natural reason we may know those 
things which pertain to the unity of the divine essence, but not those which pertain to the 
distinction of the divine persons, and he who attempts to prove by the natural reason the 
trinity of persons, detracts from the rights of faith” (Sum. Theol., I., Qu. 32, Art. 1). In 
like manner the Church’s doctrines of the creation of the world in time, of original sin, of 
the incarnation of the Logos, of the sacraments, purgatory, the resurrection of the flesh, 
the judgment of the world, and eternal salvation and damnation, are not to be demonstrated 
by natural reason. These revealed doctrines are regarded by Thomas as above, but not 
contrary to, reason. As regards these doctrines, reason can confute arguments, which are 
adduced in opposition to faith, either by showing them to be false, or by showing that 
they are not binding (solvere rationes, quas inducit (adversarius) contra fidem sive osten- 
dendo esse falsas, sive ostendendo non esse necessarias). Reason can also find out for them 
analogies or probable reasons (thus Thomas himself, in the steps of Augustine, illus- 
trates the mutual relation of the persons of the Trinity by the analogy of the soul, the 
Son, in particular, corresponding with the understanding, and the Spirit with the will); but 
it cannot from its own principles advance to the demonstration of those dogmas. The 
cause of this inability is, that reason can only conclude from the creation to God, in so far 
as God is the principle of all existence; but the creative power of God is common to the 
entire Trinity, and belongs, therefore, to the unity of essence, not to the distinction of per- 
sons (S. Th., 1... Qu. 32, Art.1). The demonstration of the doctrines peculiar to Christianity 
is only possible when the principle of revelation is admitted and faith is given to the 
documents of revelation. But that which necessitates this admission and this faith is to be 
found partly in an inward moving of God, who invites us to faith (interior instinctus Det 
invitantis), and partly in the miracles, in which are included the fulfilled prophecies and 
the triumph of the Christian religion. The indemonstrableness of the doctrines of faith is 
a source of the merit attaching to faith as an act of confidence in the divine authority. In 
the realm of faith the will has the pre-eminence (principalitatem). The intellect assents to 
the articles of faith in obediencé to the command of the will, and not because forced to do 
so by proof. The truths cognizable by natural reason are the preambles of faith (prae- 
ambula fidei), just as, in general, nature precedes grace and is not nullified by it, but per- 
fected (gratia naturam non tollit, sed perficit). It is the praeambula fidei, and only these, 
that are the subject of demonstrative arguments (rationes demonstrativae, Summa Theol., 
II. 2). But only a few are able in this way really to perceive the truths cognizable by 
natural reason; hence God has included them in his revelation. In so far, therefore, as 
the praeambula fidei are themselves propositions to be believed, they are the prima credt- 
bilia, the basis and root of all others. By its demonstrations of the praeambula fidei, and 


7 


ae 


444 THOMAS AQUINAS. 


by showing that the dogmas reserved for faith alone are not refutable by reason and are 
probable, natural reason subserves the interests of faith (natwralis ratio subservit fidet). 
This so precise determination of the boundaries of philosophical or natural theology, as 
opposed to the revealed doctrines of Christianity, was due to the influence of the mono- 
theism of Aristotle and his Arabian and Jewish commentators. None of the earlier Scho- 
lastics and none of the Church Fathers expressed the distinction in this manner. That it 
was thus made by Thomas cannot be ascribed to the influence of the Platonic or Areopa- 
gitic doctrine, in which, the rather, the trinitarian idea was ever accustomed, now in a 
more rational, and now in a more mystical form, to find its support; Thomas was influenced 
rather by the fact that with Aristotle the unity of the divine essence was identical with the 
unity of the divine person. -This distinction between the teachings of reason concerning 
God and the teachings of revelation continued prevalent (although opposed by Raymundus 


_ Lullius and others), and was even more strongly emphasized in the later periods of Scho- 


lasticism by the Nominalists. It appeared also in the post-Scholastic period, not indeed 
among the renewers of Platonism, who appealed to Plato and Plotinus and their disciples 
in confirmation of the dogma of the Trinity, but in the schools of Descartes, Locke, and 
Leibnitz, until the Critical Philosophy of Kant withdrew not only the trinity, but as well 
the unity of the divine person, from the sphere of doctrines susceptible of theoretical or 
rational demonstration, and relegated all conviction respecting God and divine things to 
the province of mere faith—faith not indeed in the teachings of revelation, but in the pos- 
tulates of the moral consciousness—while the schools of Schelling and Hegel again vindi- 
eated the right of the doctrine of the Trinity, speculatively modified or interpreted, to a 
place in rational theology. In this—but on the basis of Catholic Christianity—the latter 
were imitated by Giinther and his disciples, who excluded from the sphere of reason only the 
historical mysteries of Christianity, but failed to secure the approbation of the ecclesiastical 
authorities. Thomism is now the ruling doctrine in the Catholic Church; and in Protestant 
theology, also, the (Thomist) distinction prevails. The decree, approved at Paris in the 
year 1271, asserting the supremacy of theology over philosophy (ap. Du Boulay, III. 
p. 398; οἵ, Thurot, De Vorig. de Venseign. dans Vuniv. de Paris, Paris, 1850, p. 105 seq.), 
and directing that no instructor in the Philosophical Faculty should treat of any speci- 
fically theological question (such as the Trinity and the Incarnation), favored the same 
distinction. 

The logical and metaphysical basis of philosophy is with Thomas, even more decidedly 
than with Albert, the Aristotelian, although not without certain modifications derived 
partly from Platonism and partly from Christian theology. The Thomist doctrine of con- 
cepts, judgments, syllogisms, and proofs, is the doctrine of Aristotle. Metaphysics is 
made by hin conversant with ‘being, as such, and its modifications ” (ens in quantum ens 
et passiones entis). In itself each ens is res and wnum ; in distinction from others, it is 
aliquid ; as in harmony with the action of the knowing faculties, it is verwm; and as harmon- 
izing with the will, it is bonwn. Thomas holds with Albert the conciliatory and almost 
uominalistic form of Realism, which was taught by Aristotle, and according to which the 
universal is in reality immanent in the individual, from which it is by us mentally abstracted 
and regarded independently in consciousness. Yet Thomas does not altogether reject the 
Platonic doctrine of ideas, but only in certain regards. If, namely, by ideas are understood 
independently existing generalities, then Aristotle was right in arguing against these ideas, 
as against meaningless fictions (Universalia non habent esse in rerum natura ut sint universa- 
lia, sed solum secundum quod sunt individuata, De Anima, art. 1. Universalia non sunt res 
subsistentes, sed habent esse solum in singularibus, Contra Gent., 1. 65). But taken in another 
sense—in which sense the doctrine of ideas is supported by the authority of Saint Augus- 








THOMAS AQUINAS. 445 


tine—Thomas recognizes the theory of ideas as unobjectionable, viz.: when the ideas are 
understood as thoughts immanent in the divine mind, and when their action upon the sen- 
sible world is conceived as merely indirect (Contra Gentiles, II]. 24: formae quae sunt in 
materia, venerunt a formis, quae sunt sine materia, et quantum ad hoc, verificatur dictum 
Platonis, quod formae separatae sunt principia formarum, quae suntin materia, licet posuerit eas 
per se subsistentes et causantes immediate formas sensibilium, nos vero ponimus eas in intellectu 
existentes et causantes formas inferiores per motum coeli). Thomas admits, therefore, the 
_ existence of the universal in a threefold sense: ante rem, in re, post rem (In Sent., ΤΙ., dist., 
ILI., gu., 3). The cause, according to Thomas, which led Plato falsely to conceive the 
universal as possessing hypostatic existence, lay in his erroneous supposition that we could 
have no certain knowledge of abstract truth, unless the universal not merely possessed a 
reality of some sort, but also existed in the same manner in our thought and in external 
reality (Summa Theol., I. 84: credidit (Plato), quod forma cogniti ex necessitate sit in cog- 
noscente 60 modo, quo est in cognito, et ideo existimavit quod oporteret res intellectas hoc modo 
in se tpsis subsistere, sc. immaterialiter et immobiliter). Thomas demonstrates the incorrect- 
ness of this view by showing, in the steps of Aristotle, what is the nature of the process 
of abstraction. Just as the senses in their sphere are able to separate what realiter is not 
separate,—as the eye, 6. g., perceives only the color and shape of an apple, and not its smell 
and taste,—so, and much more even, the mind can effect the like purely subjective separa- 
tion by considering in the individuals only the universal (De Potentiis Animae, ch. 6: quia 
licet principia speciet vel generis numquam sint nist in individutis, tamen potest apprehendi 
animal sine homine, asino et aliis speciebus, et potest apprehendi homo non apprehenso Socrate 
vel Platone, et caro et ossa non apprehensis his carnibus et ossibus, et sic semper intellectus 
formas abstractas, id est superiora sine infertoribus, intelligit). Thomas goes on to prove that 
this subjective abstraction (ἀφαίρεσις) in thought is not vitiated by the fact of its not being 
founded on an objective distinction and separation (χωρισμός) of things, employing the same 
argument which was employed in the twelfth century by the author of the De Jntellectibus 
(see above, p. 396), the argument, namely, that the separation effected in thought apper- 
tains not to our judgment of the true state of the case, but is only an incident of the 
action of our minds, of the act of attention or apprehension (ibid.: nec tamen falso intelligit 
intellectus, guia non judicat hoc esse sine hoc, sed apprehendit et judicat de uno non judicando 
de altero). If, as thus appears, the universal has no substantial existence in the sphere 
of reality, it must yet possess reality in some other form, because all science respects the 
universal, and would be illusory if the universal were without all reality; the truth of 
knowledge depends on the reality of the objects of knowledge. The universal exists in 
reality in the individual, as the one in the many, as the essence of things or their quid- 
ditas ; the intellect performs only that act of abstraction whereby the universal becomes, 
in the intellect, the one beside the many. 

The individualizing principle ( principiwm individuationis) is matter, in so far as it is the 
substratum of forms or is bounded by determinate limits (Materia non quomodolibet accepia 
est principium individuationis, sed solum materia signata, et dico materiam signatam, quae sub 
certis dimensionibus consideratur : De Ente et Essentia, 2). Into the definition of man, matter 
in general (materia non signata) alone enters (in so far, namely, as man, as such, does not 
exist without matter); into the definition of Socrates, the matter, which is peculiar to hina, 
would enter, if Socrates (the individual as such) could be defined (Prima dispositio materiae 
est quantitas dimensiva, Summa Th., 111. gu. 17, art. ἃ. This doctrine rests on the propo- 
sition which Aristotle (JMet., I. 6) opposes to the theory of the Platonists, who asserted 
that the idea was the principle of unity, and matter that of indeterminate plurality: 
φαίνεται δ' ἐκ μιᾶς ὕλης μία τράπεζα, ὁ δὲ τὸ εἶδος ἐπιφέρων εἷς ὧν πολλὰς Toei). Thomists 


446 THOMAS AQUINAS, 


(notably, for example, Agidio Colonna, and, later, Paolo Soncini and others) employed the 
expression: ‘matter quantitatively determined” (materia quanta) to denote the principle 
of individuation, and referred, in justification, to the teaching of Thomas (in the Summa c. 
Gent., 11. 49 et al.: princtpium diversitatis individuorum ejusdem speciei est divisio materiae 
secundum quantitatem; De Princ. Indiv., fol. 207: quantitas determinata dicitur principiwm 
individuationis). But this quantitas determinata, according to Thomas, is not the cause, but 
only the condition of the existence of individuals. It does not create the individual sub- 
stance, but accompanies it inseparably and determines it in its actual and present form 
(hic et nunc, De Pr. Ind., ibid.). It can, indeed, be objected to this doctrine, and was 
objected by Realists, who saw in the form the principle of individuation, that quantum 
denotes a quantity already possessing individual determination, and that this determination 
is left unexplained. Moreover, since Thomas admits the existence of “separate” or 
immaterial forms (formae separatae), he teaches that these are individualized by them- 
selves, since they have no need for their existence of a form-receiving substratum 
(Formae separatae eo tpso, quod in alio recipi non possunt, habent rationem primi subjecti, et 
ideo se ipsis individuantur ;—multiplicatur in eis forma secundum rationem formae, secundum 
se et non per aliud, quia non recipiuntur in alio: omnis enim talis multiplicatio multiplicat 
speciem, et ideo in eis tot sunt species, quot sunt individua, De Nat. Mat., ch. 3; ef. De Enie, 
ch. 3). The correctness of this conclusion of Thomas may, indeed, be questioned. If the 
cause of individual existence is contained in a form-receiving principle (in a ὑποκείμενον, 
subjectum, or in some form of matter), then, if we admit that there are forms having an 
independent existence, we must of course admit with Thomas, that in them the form is its 
own substratum (subjectum, ὑποκείμενον). But the question is, whether we should not 
rather infer from the principle first laid down, that there are no “separate forms” which 
exist as individual essences, that all mere forms are merely universal (and hence, e. g., that 
the intellects of men are one in the Averroistic sense), and that all individuality depends 
on some kind of material existence. Duns Scotus (in imitation of earlier opponents of 
Thomas, who, about 1276, had already advanced similar objections) raised the question, 
how, if the doctrine of Thomas was true, the soul, which was immaterial, could be multi- 
plied (apud D. Thomam individuatio est propter materiam ; anima autem in se ipsa est sine 
materia ; quomodo ergo potest multiplicart) ? 

Aristotle had regarded the Deity and the active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός), which was the 
only immortal part of the soul, as immaterial and yet individual forms; yet it is not per- 
fectly clear how he conceived the relation between this immortal intellect and the individual 
soul into which it was reputed to enter from without. Among his earliest successors, the 
naturalistic leaning toward the conception of all form as immanent in matter, gained 
ground more and more; on this conception rest the doctrines of Dicsearch and Strato. Alex- 
ander of Aphrodisias conceded to the Deity, but to the Deity alone, a transcendent, immate- 
rial, yet individual existence; but he represented the soul as completely dependent on matter 
in all that relates to its individual existence. The Jater Exegetes, disciples of Neo-Pla- 
tonism, defended the doctrine of the individual, independent existence of the human intel- 
lect (νοῦς), as well as that of the Deity, and in this they were followed by Thomas, in 
especial opposition to the Averroistic conception; and Thomas also, like Albert, ascribed 
to the soul, regarded as substantial and separate from the body, not only the highest func- 
tions, which are implied in thought, but also the lower ones. 

Thomas discriminates between several classes of forms. Immaterial forms (formae 
separatae) are God, the angels, and human souls; the forms of sensible objects are insepara- 
bly united to matter. 

God is the absolutely simple form; he is pure actuality. God’s being is indeed per se 


| 








et 


THOMAS AQUINAS. 447 


gertain, because his essence is identical with his being, so that the predicate of the pro- | 
position, “God is,” is identical with the subject. But God’s being is not immediately ἢ 


certain for us, because we do not know what God is. God's existence, so far as our 
knowledge is concerned, is something to be proved, and the grounds for this proof are to be 
sought in that which is more knowable for us, although not most knowable in itself, ὦ e., 


in the works of God (Summa Th., I. 2,1). This methodical principle is the Aristotelian | 


principle that the prior (πρότερον) or more knowable (γνωριμῶτερον) by nature (φύσει) must 
be learned by us from that which is prior or more knowable for us (ἡμῖν γνωριμώτερον or 
πρότερον προς ἡμᾶς), %. 6., the conditioning from the conditioned. Accordingly, Thomas 


represents God as only a posteriori knowable for us, and regards those proofs, which, like — 


Anselm’s, are founded on the mere conception of God, as not binding. The system of 
faith, which presupposes the existence of God, proceeds from the consideration of God to 
the consideration of the created world; but in philosophy we must advance from the 
knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of God. When Thomas Aquinas says: God 
cannot be known a priori, he means by α priori knowledge that which Aristotle means by 
the same expression, viz.: a knowledge of things derived from the knowledge of their 
causes (which is obviously impossible in the case of the uncaused supreme cause), and not, 
according to the modern Kantian modification of that expression, knowledge which is 
wholly independent of experience. In a certain sense, says Thomas, man has naturally 
(naturaliter) the knowledge of God. He has it in so far as God is for him the happiness 
(beatitudo) for which he natwrally seeks; for seeking implies a kind of knowledge. But for 
certain and clear knowledge proof is necessary; the existence of God is neither a mere 
article of belief, nor, like those propositions whose predicates are already contained in the 
concept of the subject (S. Th., I. 2, 1), an axiomatic or self-evident truth (it is not an 
“analytical judgment” in the Kantian sense; and of ‘‘synthetic judgments a priori” there 
are, according to Thomas, none). After mentioning two arguments against the existence 
of God, of which the one is taken from the presence of evil in the world—which, it is 
affirmed, is incompatible with the existence of an infinite goodness—and the other from 
the possibility of tracing all natural results to nature and all intended ones to human 
thought and will, Thomas proposes (Summa Th., I., qu. 2, art. 3) the following proofs of 
God’s existence: 1. There must be a first unmoved principle of motion (after Arist., Met., 
XII. 7). 2. The series of active causes cannot recede in infinitum, because in all regular 
causal series the first terms in the series are the causes of the middle terms, and these are 
the causes of the last. (The finiteness of the number of terms, which was to be proved, is 
here presupposed by Thomas). 3. The accidental depends on the necessary, and the 
necessary either on something else that is necessary or on itself; hence, since this series 
also cannot extend backwards in infinitum, there must exist a necessary being, the cause 
of whose necessity is not to be found anywhere but in himself, and which being is the 
cause of necessity for other things. 4. There are found in things different degrees of per- 
fection; hence there is something which has the highest degree of perfection and is, there- 
fore, the cause of the perfection, goodness, and reality of all other things; that is, there 
exists a most perfect or most real being. 5. Natural objects, which have not the power 
of knowledge, nevertheless act as if with intelligence; but that which has no knowledge 
can only then work with an appearance of intelligence, when it is directed by a knowing 
being, as the arrow is directed by the archer. Natural causes are therefore insufficient for 
the explanation of the processes of nature, and there must be assumed to exist an intelli- 
gent being as their guide and ruler. Thus the ultimate explanation of natural effects and 
also of human actions, in so far as they imply an unconscious adaptation of means to ends, 
cannot be found in nature and the human mind, but must be referred to God as their first 


448 THOMAS AQUINAS. 


cause; the existence of evil does not conflict with this, since God overrules for good the 
evil which he permits. 
Thomas follows Albert in refuting the pantheistic doctrine of Amalrich of Bena and 
David of Dinant, that God is the essence of all things, and hence either their forma univer- 
\ salis, which Amalrich may have taught, or the materia universalis, as professed by David. 
This doctrine was maintained on the ground that, if God were not himself the most uni- 
versal of things, he would be distinguished therefrom by a specific difference, and so 
consist of genus and differentia, and consequently not be simple; but only inasmuch as he is 
the absolutely simple being can God be the absolutely necessary being. Thomas denies 
that all diversity implies specific differences and a generic agreement. Two objects, he 
says, may suffer absolutely no comparison with each other (may be completely disparate), 
and such is the relation between the infinite and the finite (quod differant non aliquo extra 
se, sed quod differant potius se ipsis, In Libr. 11. Sent., Distinct. XVII., qu. 1, art. 2). 
All beings, says Thomas, except God were created by God. At the creation God chose 
from the various possible worlds the best one, and gave to it reality. The world has not 
| existed from eternity, but only since a definite moment, with which moment time itself 
\ began. Thomas regards the creatureship of the world not as a matter of mere faith, but 
᾿ as scientifically demonstrable (by the above cited proofs of the existence of God as the 
author of the world), but the beginning of the world in time he regards as only an article 
‘of faith and not philosophically demonstrable; the arguments of Aristotle for.the past 
eternity of the world are in his view not conclusive, and yet he is at the same time just as 
far from ascribing to the philosophical arguments for the beginning of the world in time 
full demonstrative force. The dictum: The efficient cause must precede in time that which 
it causes (oportet, ut causa agens praecedat duratione suum causatum), is, he says, not true in 
relation to a perfect cause; God could by his almighty power create an eternal world. 
That the world was created from nothing does not (as Albert and his predecessors had 
assumed) prove its temporal origin; for ‘‘from nothing” (ex nthilo) implies only the non- 
existence of anything from which the world was made (non esse aliquid, unde sit factum, or 
non ex aliquo); but this non-existence does not need to be referred to a temporal past, and 
‘from nothing ” (ex nihilo) implies something which followed after this nothing (post nihilum), 
not necessarily in the sense of temporal succession, but only in that of order (posterius 
secundum ordinem naturae). Nor would the world, if eternal, be like God in essence: for 
the world is subject to constant change in time, while God is unchangeable. The principle 
of the impossibility of a regressus in infinitum in causis efficientibus offers no difficulty, for in 
the world there are only intermediate causes, and the absolute cause is not involved in the 
question of the world’s eternity. If the incompatibility of the past eternity of the world 
with the immortality of the individual human soul be affirmed (an objection afterward 
renewed by Luther), on the ground that in the past infinity of time there must have come 
into being an infinite number of souls, which could yet not actually co-exist, Thomas 
rejoins, that at least the angels, if not men, could have been created from eternity. 
Accordingly, Thomas affirms: mundum incipisse (initium durationis habuisse) sola fide 
tenetur, ‘that the world had a beginning in time, is an article of mere belief.” The pre- 
servation of the world, Thomas, with Augustine, conceives as an ever-renewed creation 
(Contra Gent., 11. 38; S. Th., I. qu. 46 and 104). Cf. Frohschammer, Ueber die Ewigkeit der 
Welt, in the Athendium, I., Munich, 1862, p. 609 seq.). 
\ The angels were the first and the noblest creatures of God. They have their being not 
through themselves, but from God; their being is not identical with their nature. They 
are not absolutely simple. The plurality of angels is a plurality of individuals; but since 
they are immaterial, the difference between them in the sense explained above (p. 446) can 

















THOMAS AQUINAS. 449 


only be conceived of as of the same nature with the difference between species; as many 
as are the individuals, so many are the species (fot sunt species, quot sunt individua). 
Among the angels must be classed the intelligences which move the stars. That the stars 
are moved, not by a physical, but by an intellectual cause (hence either by God or by 
angels), Thomas holds to be apodictically certain, and that they are moved by angels he 
regards as rationally probable (C. Gent., III. 23 etal). (Cf. A. Schmid, Die peripatetisch- 
scholastische Lehre von den Gestirngeistern, in the Athendum, I., Munich, 1862, pp. 549-589). 

Like the angels, so also the souls of men are immaterial forms, formae separatae. 
Thomas accepts the Aristotelian definition of the soul as the entelechy of the body, as also 
the Aristotelian division of the psychical functions; but ascribes to the same soul, which 
as νοῦς, or rational soul, has individual and yet immaterial existence and is separable from 
the body, the animal and vegetable functions, so that for him the form-producing principle 
of the body, the anima sensitiva, appetitiva, and motiva, and, finally, the anima rationalis, 
are all one and the same substance. (This doctrine attained at the Council of Vienne, 
1311, to the authority of a dogma.) The vegetative and animal faculties, which Aristotle 
_conceived as necessarily connected with the body, are represented by Thomas (as by 
Albert) as depending only in their temporal activity on bodily organs. The intellect alone 
works without an organ, because the form of the organ would hinder the correct knowledge 
of other forms than itself (Comm. de An., III. 4; S. Th., I., qu. 75, art. 2). God and the 
active and passive human intellects are related to each other as are the sun, its light, and 
the eye ( Quodliveta, VII., VIII.). The forms, which the passive intellect takes from the 
external world through the senses, are rendered really intelligible by the active intellect, 
as the colors of bodies are made really visible by the light, and through abstraction they 
are raised by the same agency to an independent existence in our consciousness. All 
human knowledge depends on an influence of some sort exerted by the objects known 
on the knowing soul. There is no knowledge that is innate and independent of all expe- 
rience. He who is deprived of a sense wants the corresponding conceptions; one born 
blind has no conception of colors. The human intellect needs, in order to its earthly 
activity, a sensuous image (phantasma), without which no actual thought is possible for it, 
although the senses as such grasp, not the essence of things, but only their accidents. 
(S. Th., I., qu. 78, art. 3: sensus non apprehendit essentias rerum, sed exteriora accidentia 
solum. 8S. Th., 1., qu. 84 (cf. qu. 19): Intellectus agens facit phantasmata a sensibus accepta 
intelligibilia per modwm abstractionis cujusdam. Ib., qu. 84: Impossibile est intellectum nos- 
trum secundum praesentis vitae statum, quo passibili corpori conjungitur, aliquid intelligere in 
actu, nist convertendo se ad phantasmata. Et hoc duobus indiciis apparet. Primo quidem, 
quia quum intellectus sit vis quaedam non utens corporali organo, nullo modo impediretur in suo 
actu per laesionem alicujus corporalis organi, si non requireretur ad ejus actum actus alicujus 
potentiae utentis organo corporali. Utuntur autem organo corporali sensus et imaginatio et 
aliae vires pertinentes ad partem sensitivam, unde manifestum est, quod ad hoc quod intellectus 
actu intelligat, non solum accipiendo scientiam de novo, sed etiam utenda scientia jam acquisita, 
requiritur actus imaginationis et caeterarum virtutum. Videmus enim, quod impedito actu 
virtutis imaginativae per laesionem organi, ut in phreneticis, et similiter impedito actu memora- 
tivae virtutis, ut in lethargicis, impeditur homo ab intelligendo in actu etiam ea quorum scientiam 
praeaccepit. Secundo, quia hoc quilibet in se ipso experiri potest, quod quando aliquis conatur 
akquid intelligere, format sibi aliqua phantasmata, per modum exemplorum, in quibus quast 
inspiciat quod intelligere studet. Et inde est etiam quod quando aliquem volumus facere aliquid 
intelligere, proponimus ei exempla, ex quibus sibi phantasmata formare possit ad intelligendum. 
Hujus autem ratio est, quia potentia cognoscitiva proportionatur cognoscibili. Unde intellectus 
angelici, qui est totaliter a corpore separatus, objectum proprium est substantia intelligibilis a 


480 THOMAS AQUINAS. 


corpore separata, et per hujusmodi intelligibile materialia cognoscit ; intellectus autem humans, 
qui est conjunctus corport, proprium oljectum est quidditas sive natura in materia corporali 
existens, et per hujusmodi naturas visibilium rerum etiam in invisibilium rerum aliqualem cog- 
nitionem ascendit, de ratione autem hujus naturae est, quod non est absque materia corporali.— 
Si autem proprium objectum intellectus nostri esset forma separata, vel si formae rerum sensi- 
bilium subsisterent non in particularibus secundum Platonicos, non oporteret quod intellectus 
noster semper intelligendo converteret se ad phantasmata). 

The Averroistic theory of the unity of the immaterial and immortal intellect in all men 
(intellectum subsiantiam esse omnino ab anima separatam esseque unum in omnibus hominibus), 
whereby individual immortality was rendered theoretically impossible, is termed by Thomas 
an “error indecentior,” which had for some time been acquiring influence with many per- 
sons. He argues partly against the correctness of the Averroistic interpretation of Aris- 
totle, and partly against the Averroistic teaching itself. In opposition to the interpretation, 
he asserts that it results clearly from the words of Aristotle, that the active intellect, in 
the opinion of Aristotle, belonged to the soul itself (quod hic intellectus sit aliquid animae), 
that it was not a material faculty and that it worked without a material organ, and that it 
therefore existed separate from matter and entered from without into the body, after the 
dissolution of which it could still remain active. Against the truth of the Averroistic 
doctrine Thomas advances the arguments that the possession by man of an intellect sepa- 
rate from the soul would not justify us in calling man himself a rational being, while yet 
rationality is the specific difference which separates man from the brutes, that with reason 
you take away at the same time the will, and therefore the moral character, and finally, 
that the necessary relation of thought to sensuous images (phantasmata) could not subsist 
in an intellect separated from the soul. But the theory of the unity of the active intellect 
in all men seems to him absurd, because there would follow from it the individual unity of 
different persons and the complete similarity of their thoughts, consequences that contra- 
dict experience. But it must be remarked that these objections are only pertinent in case 
the one intellect separable from all individuals is interpreted, not as the one common mind 
existing in the plurality of rational individuals, but as an intellect existing individually for 
and by itself externally to them. 

Thomas pronounces himself equally opposed to the doctrine of the pre-existence of the 
human soul, aid in favor of the doctrine of its continued existence after the termination of 
its terrestrial life. To the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence he opposes the argument that 
for the soul, as the “form” of the body, union with the body is natural, and separation, if 
not contra, is at least praeter naturam, hence accidental, and therefore also subsequent to 
union (quod convenit alicui praeter natwram, inest et per accidens ; quod autem per accidens est, 
semper posterius est eo quod est per se. Animae igitur prius conventt esse unitam corpori quam 

| esse ὦ corpore separatam). God creates the soul outright, as soon as the body is prepared 
‘for it (CL Gent. 11. 83 seq.). But the immortality of the soul follows from its immateriality. 
Forms which inhere in matter are destroyed by the dissolution of this matter, as are the 
souls of animals on the dissolution of their bodies. But the human soul, which, since it 
has the power of cognizing the universal, must subsist apart from matter, can neither be 
destroyed by the dissolution of the body with which it is united, nor by itself, since neces- 
sary being is implied in the very conception of form, which is actuality, and such being is 
therefore inseparable from such form (S. Th., I. 75, 6: tmpossibile est, quod forma subsistens 
desinat esse). (This argument is similar to that of Plato in the Phaedo, viz.: that life is 
inseparable from the soul according to the very idea of the latter.) Thomas joins with 
this the argument drawn from the longing of the soul after immortality, and founded on 
the principle that a natural longing cannot remain unsatisfied. The desire of unending 


CPEs χαρὰς: Rees 





estas 











THOMAS AQUINAS. 451 


being is natural to the thinking soul, because the latter is not confined in its thoughts by 
the limit of the Now and the Here, but is able to abstract from every limitation, and desire 
follows knowledge (S. Th., I. 75). Immortality belongs not merely to the thinking power, 
but also to the lower powers, for all of these belong to the same substance with the 
thinking power, and depend only for their active manifestation, not for their existence, on 
bodily organs (Jb., qu. 76: dicendum est, quod nulla alia forma substantialis est in homine nisi 
sola anima intellectiva, et quod tpsa sicut virtute continet animam sensitivam et nutritivam, ita 
virtute continet omnes inferiores formas et facit ipsa sola quidquid imperfectiores formae in aliis 
Jfaciunt.—Anima intellectiva habet non solum virtutem intelligendi, sed etiam virtutem sentiendi, 
Ib., qu. 76, art. 5). Since this thinking and feeling soul is at the same time the form-giving 
principle of the body, it forms for itself after death, by means of this very power, a new 
body, similar to its former one (Summa c. Gent., IV. 79 seq.). 

In Ethics Thomas follows Aristotle in the definition of virtue and in the division of the 
virtues into ethical and dianoetic, the latter being also ranked by him, as by Aristotle, as 
the higher. He ranks, further, the contemplative life, in so far as the contemplation is 
theological, above the practical. But to the philosophical virtues, chief among which 
Thomas, with Albert, reckons the four cardinal virtues, he adds the theological virtues of 
faith, love, and hope; the former, as acquired virtues, lead to natural happiness, but the 
latter, the theological virtues, as being infused by God (virtutes imfusae), lead to super- 
natural happiness. Thomas’s doctrine of virtue is made still more complicated by his 
adoption (after Macrobius) of the Plotinic distinction between civil, purifying, and perfect- 
ing virtues (virtutes politicae, purgatoriae, exemplares). The will is not subject to the neces- 
sity of compulsion—where compulsion is opposed to desire—but to that necessity which does 
not destroy freedom, the necessity of striving after ends. Voluntary action is self-action, 
ὦ, e., action resulting from an internal principle (Moveri voluntarie est moveri ex se, id est a prin- 
cipio intrinseco, Summa Th., I., qu. 105). The animal, confined as he is to the particular, 
judges of ends by instinct, but man does so freely and after comparison by the reason (ex 
collatione quadam rationis). By calling up one or another class of ideas we can control our 


decisions. The choice lies in our power; still, we have need of divine help in order to be ἡ 


truly good, even in the sphere of the natural virtues, which, if man had not fallen, he could 
have practiced by his own strength. The moral faculty (synderesis or synterests), which 
was not destroyed by the fall of man, cannot be a mere potentiality. It is a habitus quidam 
naturalis principiorum operabiliwm, sicut intellectus habitus est principiorum speculabilium ;— 


conscientia est actus, quo scientiam nostram ad ea quae agimus, applicamus. Highest and per- | 


fect happiness is the vision of the divine essence; and this, since it is a good which sur- | 
passes the power of created beings to produce, can only be given to finite spirits by the | 
agency of God (Summa Th., I., qu. 82 seq.; 11. 1 seq.). 

In 1286 Thomas was made a doctor ordinis by the Dominicans; afterward the Jesuits 
also adopted substantially his teaching. His authority early became so generally recog- 
nized in the Church beyond the circle of his order as to justify the title of honor, ‘‘ Doctor 
universalis.” Still more frequently was Thomas called ‘‘ Doctor angelicus.” Of his immediate 
disciples, the most noteworthy are A®gidius of Colonna, of Rome, an Augustinian monk 
extolled as Doctor fundatissimus (1247-1316); the Dominican monk, Herveeus Natalis (Her- 
veus of Nedellec in Brittany), renowned as an opponent of the Scotists (died at Narbonne 
in 1323); Thomas Bradwardine (died 1349), who upheld strongly the doctrine of deter- 
minism, in opposition to the semipelagianism of the Scotists, and William Durand of St. 
Pourcain (Durandus de §. Porciano, died 1332, called “ Doctor resolutissimus”). who, how- 
ever, from being a supporter of Thomism, became its opponent, and prepared the way for 
nominalism. We may mention also Agidius of Lessines—who defended the Thomist doc 


452, JOHANNES DUNS SCOTUS. 


trine in a work entitled De Unitate Formae, written in 1278—and Bernardus de Trilia 
(died 1292), who wrote Quaestiones de Cognitione Animae, and Johannes Parisiensis (about 
1290), who was perhaps the author of the ‘‘ Defensorivm” of the Thomist doctrine against 
the ‘ Correctorium fratris Thomae,” written (in 1284) by William Lamarre, a Franciscan; 
the Defensorium (printed at Venice in 1516) has usually been ascribed to A’gidius Romanus. 
Farther, Gottfried of Fontaines (de Fontibus), the teacher at the Sorbonne, from whose 
Quodlibeta, composed about a. D. 1283, Hauréau (Ph. Scol., II. p. 291 seq.) gives some 
extracts, favored Thomism. Dante’s poetry is also based on the doctrine of Thomas (ef. 
Vol. 11., § 3, of this work, and especially the work there cited of Ozanam on Dante and 
the Cath. Philos. in the thirteenth century, Paris, 1845; cf. also Wegele, Dante Alighieri’s 
Leben und Werke, 2d ed., Jena, 1865; Charles Jourdain, La philosophie de St. Thomas 
α' Aquin, 11. p. 128 seq., and Hugo Delff, Dante Alighieri, Leipsic, 1869. Delff points out, 
in particular, the influence of Platonism and Mysticism in the works of Dante). Of the 
later Thomists, the most prominent was Franz Suarez, who died in 1617. Of him, as the 
last chief of Scholasticism, K. Werner has written at length (in a work published at 
Regensburg in 1861). 


§ 102. Johannes Duns Scotus, born at Dunston, in Northumber- 
land (or, according to others, at Dun, in the North of Ireland), distin. 
_ guished himself in the Franciscan Order as a teacher and disputer, 
᾿ first at Oxford, then, in 1804 and the following years, at Paris, and 
in 1308 at Cologne, and died while still young (according to the 
ordinary account at the age of thirty-four) at Cologne, in November, 
1308. As an opponent of Thomism he founded the philosophical and 
theological school named after him. His strength lay rather in acute, 
negative criticism of the teachings of others, than in the positive 
elaboration of his own. Strict faith in reference to the theological 
teachings of the Church and the philosophical doctrines corresponding 
with their spirit, and far-reaching skepticism with reference to the 
arguments by which they are sustained, are the general characteristics 
of the Scotist doctrine. After having destroyed by his criticism their 
rational grounds, there remains to Scotus as the objective cause of the 
verities of faith only the unconditional will of God, and as the subjec- 
tive ground of faith only the voluntary submission of the believer to the 
authority of the Church. Theology is for him a knowledge of an essen- 
tially practical character. Duns Scotus limits the province of natural 
theology by reckoning not only, with Thomas, the Trinity, the inear- 
nation, and the other specifically Christian dogmas, but also the 
creation, of the world out of nothing and the immortality of the 
human soul, as among the propositions which reason cannot demon- 
strate, but can only defend as being beyond the reach of refutation 
and as more or less probable, and which revelation alone rendered 
certain. Still he by no means affirms in principle the antagonism of 





JOHANNES DUNS SCOTUS. 4538 


reason and faith. In philosophy, the authority of Aristotle is not so 
great with him as with Thomas; he adopts many Platonic and Neo- 
Platonic conceptions, with which he became familiar especially through 
Avicebron’s (Ibn Gebirol’s) “ Fountain of Life.” All created things, 
says Scotus, have besides their form some species of matter. Not 
matter, but form, is the individualizing principle; the generic and 
specific characters are modified by the individual peculiarity, which 
is what renders an object capable of being designated as “this” 
(gives it its haccceitas). The universal essence is distinct, not only 
in the intellect, but also in reality, from the individual peculiarity, 
although it does not exist apart from the latter; the distinction is not 
merely virtually present in things and afterward realized by the mind, 
but it exists formally in the things themselves. The soul unites in 
itself several faculties, which differ from one another, not realiter, as 
parts or accidents or relations, but formaliter, as do unity, truth, and 
goodness in God (the Ans). The human will is not determined by 
the understanding, but has power to choose with no determining 
ground. The undetermined freedom of the will is the ground of the 
merit. of that self-determination which is in conformity with the 
divine will. 


There exists only the following complete edition of the works of Duns Scotus: Joh. Dunsii Scoti, 
doctoris subtilis ordinis minorum, opera omnia collecta, recognita, notis et scholiis et commentariis εἰ, 
Lyons, 1639. This edition was prepared by the Irish fathers of the Roman College of St. Isidorus; Lucas 
Wadding, the annalist of the Franciscan Order and principal editor of the edition, is ordinarily named as its 
editor. It does not contain the Positivu, i. e., the Commentaries on the Bible, but only the philosophical 
and dogmatic writings (quae ad rem speculativam spectant or tissertationes scholasticas). Vol. 1. 
Logicalia. 11. Comment. in libros Physic. (spurious); Quaestiones supra libros Arist. de anima. III. 
Tractutus de rerum principio, Theoremata, Collationes, etc. IV. Eepositio in Metaph., Conclusiones 
metaphysicae, Quaestiones supra libros Metaphysicorum. YV.-X. Distinctiones in quatuor libros sen- 
tentiarwm, the so-called Opus Oxoniense. XI. Reportatorum Parisiensium libri quatuor, the so-called 
Opus Parisiense, the Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, which was written down by 
persons who heard his lectures at the University of Paris (in Erdmann’s judgment less perfect in expository 
form, though, in some of its theorems, indicating greater maturity than the Opus Owoniense). XII. Quaes- 
teones quodlibetales. The Quuestiones quod libetales was published separately, Venice, 1506, the Reportata 
super IV.1. sententiarum, Paris, 1517-18, and by Hugo Cavellus, Cologne, 1635, the Quaestiones in Ar. lcg., 
1520 and 1622, Super libros de anima, 1528, and by Hugo Cavellus, Lyons, 1625, the Distinetiones in 
quatuor libros sententiarwm, by Hugo Cavellus, Antwerp, 1620. Among the earlier works on Scotism, 
that of Joannes de Reda is particularly instructive. It is entitled: Controversiae theologicae inter S. 
Thomam et Scotum super quatuor libros sententiarwm, in quibus pugnantes sententiae referuntur, 
potiores difficultates elucidantur et responsiones ad argumenta Scoti rejiciuntur, Venice, 1599, and 
Cologne, 1620. A Swnma Theol. was compiled from the works of Duns Scotus by the Franciscan monk 
Hieronymus de Fortino; a general exposition of the Scotist doctrine is given by Fr. Eleuth. Albergoni in 
his Resolutio doctrinae Scoticae, in qua quid Doctor subtilis cigca singulas quas exagitat quaestiones 
sentiat, breviter ostenditur, Lyons, 1643. Of more recent authors, Baumgarten-Crusius has written a J¢ 
theol. Scoti, Jena, 1826. The philosophical system of Scotus is described in the larger histories of philoso- 
phy; ef. also Erdmann, Andeutungen iiber die wissenschaftliche Stellung des Duns Scotus, in the Theol. 
Studien und Kr., 1863, No. 8, pp. 429-451, and Grdr. der Geschichte der Phélos., I. ὃ 213-215; Prantl, 
Gesch, der Log., 111. 202-282, 


——— 


454 JOHANNES DUNS SCOTUS. 


In the doctrine of Duns Scotus, as in that of Thomas, philosophy was made almost 
throughout ancillary to theology in all that concerns the general and specifically Christian 
dogmas. Theologia Naturalis was indeed confined by Scotus within narrower limits, but it 
was not abolished. Natural reason, said Scotus, conducts to the beatifying vision of 
God, but needs to be completed by revelation. It does not conflict with the teachings of 
revelation, and, so far from being indifferent in its relation to these teachings, it furnishes 
them with an essential support. As a theologian, Scotus defended the doctrine, first made 
a dogma in our times, but which is in complete correspondence with the spirit of Catholi- 
cism, the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio B. Virginis, whereas Thomas had not yet 
recognized it. The criticism of the opinions of others, which is the predominant charac- 
teristic in the writings of Scotus, is not a speculation with reference to the nature or prin- 
ciples of Scholasticism, and tending to the destruction of Scholasticism; for his object 
remains always the establishment of a harmony between philosophy and the teaching of 
the Church. His doubting is not to the prejudice of faith; he says (Jn Sent., 111. 22): 
Faith does not exclude all doubt, but only victorious doubt (nec fides excludit omnem dubita- 
tionem, sed dubitationem vincentem). Although, therefore, Scotus’ critique of the validity of 
the arguments for Christian doctrine might and necessarily did prepare the way for the 
rupture between philosophy and theology, and although some of his utterances went 
beyond the limit which he prescribed for himself in principle, Scotism is none the less, like 
Thomism, one of the doctrines ins which Scholasticism culminates. 

The relation of Duns Scotus tox Thomas of Aquino was similar to that of Kant to Leib- 


nitz. Thomas and Leibnitz were dogmatists ; Duns Scotus and Kant were critics, who 


disputed more or less the arguments forthe theorems of natural theology (especially those 
for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul), but did not deny the truth of 
the theorems themselves; both founded the convictions, for which the theoretical reason 
no longer furnished them with proofs, on the moral will, to which they assigned the 
priority over the theoretical reason. A fundamental difference is indeed to be found in the 
circumstance that for Duns Scotus the authority of the Catholic Church, for Kant that of 
the personal moral consciousness, is the court of final appeal, and in the further circum- 
stance that Kant’s critique is radical and universal, while that of Scotus was only partial. 
But as Scotus to the doctrines of the Church, so Kant to the convictions of the universal 
religious consciousness ever maintains the positive relation of one who assents to them in 
that particular sense in which that consciousness understands them. 

Having enjoyed in his youth the advantage of discipline in mathematical and other 
studies, Duns Scotus knew what was meant by proving, and could therefore recognize in 
most of the pretended proofs offered in philosophy and theology no real proofs. At the 
same time the authority of the Church was in his view sacred and inviolable. The har- 
monious combination of the desire for scientific exactness with the disposition to accept 
with faith the Church’s dicta, characterizes the ‘‘ Doctor subtilis.” With him logic is a 
science, like physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. But in theology, notwithstanding 
that its object is the highest of all objects, he finds it difficult to recognize the characteristics 
of ascience, because it maintains itself only on grounds of probability and is of much greater 
practical than theoretical importance. 

With Albert and Thomas, Duns Scotus agrees in assuming a threefold existence of the 
universal: it is before things, as form in the divine mind; in things, as their essence (quid- 
ditas), and after things, as the concept formed by mental abstraction. He, too, condemns 
nominalism and vindicates for the universal a real existence, on the ground that otherwise 
our knowledge through concepts would be without a real object; all science, he says, 
would resolve itself into mere logic, if the universal, to which all scientific knowledge 











JOHANNES DUNS SCOTUS. 455 


relates, consisted merely of rational concepts. Reality seems to him in itself indifferent in 
relation to universality and individuality, so that both can equally belong to its sphere. 
But Duns Scotus is not at one with his predecessors on the subject of the relation of the 
universal to the individual. The universal should not, according to him, be identified with 
the form nor the individualizing principle with the matter; for the individual, as the ultima 
realitas, can, since individual existence is not a deficiency, only through the addition of 
positive determinations arise from the universal, 7. e., only when the universal essence or 
the guidditas is completed by the individual nature (haecceitas). Just as animal becomes 
homo, when to life the specific difference of hwmanitas is added, so homo becomes Socrates, 
when to the generic and specific essence the individual character, the Socratiias, is added. 
Hence also the immaterial can be individual in the full meaning of this term; the Thomist 
view, that in angels species and individual coincide, and that, therefore, every angel is 
alone in its kind. is to be rejected. In the single object the universal is not only virtualiter 
but formaliter distinct from the individual, but not separated from it, as one thing is sepa- 
rated from another thing. Duns Scotus seeks to prevent the confounding of his doctrine 
with the Platonic doctrine (in the sense in which, from the accounts of Aristotle, he under- 
stands and combats that doctrine, Opus Oxon., II., dist. 3; Report. Paris., I., dist. V. 36; 
Theorem., 3 εἰ al.). 

The most universal of all concepts is, according to Duns Scotus, the concept of Being 
(Ens, see De An., qu. 21). This concept is of wider signification than are the logical cate- 
gories, or it is a “transcendent” concept, for not only the substantial zs, but also the acci- 
dental zs; in like manner it is more general than the concepts God and the world, for being 
is a predicate of both, and that, too, not merely aequivoce (not by mere homonymy, simi- 
larity of words without similarity of meaning). Yet this concept is not properly to be 
called the highest generic concept, for the genus presupposes likeness of category; no 
genus can at once include what is substantial and what is accidental. Hence the expres- 
sion “generic concept” is inapplicable to the concept Hns, and, in general, to all trans- 
cendental concepts. The other transcendentalia besides Ens are called by Duns Scotus 
passiones Entis, or modifications of being. He distinguishes (Metaph., IV., n. 9) two kinds 
of them, the simple (wnicae) and the disjunctive (disjunctae). Among the former he reckons 
One, Good, True (unwm, bonum, verum); among the latter identity or difference (idem vel 
diversum), contingence or necessity (contingens vel necessarium), and actuality or potentiality 
(actus vel potentia). The distinction of equal and unequal, like and unlike, can also be 
regarded as transcendent, when not referred merely to the categories of quantity and 
quality (Opus Oxon., 1., dist. 19, qu. 1). 

God, as being actus purus, is absolutely simple. His existence, according to Scotus, 
does not follow for us from the mere idea which we have of him (ex terminis), nor is it 
demonstrable a priori, ¢. e., by reasoning from his cause, since he has no cause, but only 
@ posteriori, z. e., from his works. There must be an ultimate cause superior to all else, 
which cause is at the same time the ultimate end of all things, and this is God. Scotus 
admits, however, the impossibility of arriving in this way—w. e., by arguing from f° finite 
—at the strict demonstration of anything more than the existence of one ultimate cause, 
on which all things finite depend. It is impossible in this way to prove the existence of 
an absolutely almighty cause, or the creation of the world out of nothing (Opus Oxon., I., 
dist. 42; Rep. Paris., 1., dist.42; Quodlib., qu. 1). In so far as man is the image of God, 
self-contemplation may furnish him a point of departure from which he can rise via emt- 
nentiae to the knowledge of the divine nature (Opus Oxon., I., dist. 3). 

Everything which is not God, including the created spirit, has matter and form. But 
the matter which underlies the human soul and the angels, is very different from that of 


456 JOHANNES DUNS SCOTUS. 


which bodies are composed. Duns Scotus calls matter, when not yet determined by form 
materia prima, but makes a further, threefold distinction between materia primo-prima, the 
most universal basis of all finite existence, created and formed immediately by God, materia 
secundo-prima, the substratum in which generatio and corruptio take place, and which is 
changed and transformed by the second or created class of agents (agentia creata or secun- 
daria), and materia tertio-prima, the matter which is shaped by the artist, or, in general, 
by any external agent, after it has received, through the internal operation of nature, a 
natural form, and before it has as yet been shaped in agreement with the form intended by 
the artist. The materia secundo-prima is a materia primo-prima distinguished by the mark 
of perishability, and the materia tertio-prima is a materia secundo-prima determined by 
natural generatio. There exists no matter besides the first-enamed, but only this under 
various forms (materia prima est idem cum omni materia particulari). In connection with 
the theorem that every created substance, whether spiritual or corporeal, has some form 
of matter, Duns Scotus expressly affirms his adhesion to the doctrine of Avicebron (whom 
Albert and Thomas had opposed), saying: ‘‘ego autem ad positionem Avicembronis redeo.” 
(Cf. Avicebron’s doctrine, above, § 96, and in Munk, J/é/., p. 9 seq.) Like Avicebron, so 
also Scotus regards as that which is most universal, matter, absolutely undetermined, 
which, since it is undifferentiated, is the same in all created beings (quod unica sit materia), 
so that the world appears to him as a gigantic tree, whose root is matter, whose branches 
are all perishable substances, whose leaves are the changeable accidents, whose fruit the 
angels are, and which God planted and cares for (De Rerum Princ., qu. VIII.). Duns 
Seotus, the hierarchist and enemy of the Jews, who even held it justifiable to resort to 
the compulsory agency of the secular power to force Jews into the Church, had no sus- 
picion that Avicebron, on whose teachings his own were founded, was the Jew Ibn 
Gebirol, whose songs were highly esteemed in the synagogue. 

The fundamental proposition of Scotus in psychology and ethics was this: voluntas est 
superior intellectu, the will is superior to the intellect. The will is the moving agent in the 
moving element in the whole realm of the soul, and everything obeys it. In his doctrine 
of the speculative functions Scotus agrees mostly with Thomas. He too opposes, even 
more decidedly than his predecessor, the theory of in-born knowledge; he does not admit 
such knowledge even in the angels, in whom Thomas represents God as having implanted, 
by radiation from himself, intelligible forms. The intellect forms universal concepts by 
abstraction from perceptions. It is unnecessary that between knowledge and its object 
there should subsist an equality (aequalitas), but only a proportion between the knowing 
agent and the object known (proportio motivi ud mobile). Thomas, says Scotus, taught 
incorrectly, that the lower is unable to know the higher. In the act of perception Scotus 
teaches that the soul is not a mere recipient, but an active participant. He emphasizes 
still more the activity of the soul in the higher speculative functions, and especially in its 
free assent to propositions which are not absolutely certain. Besides external perception, 
which takes place per speciem impressam, Scotus recognizes an intuitive act of self-appre- 
hension on the part of the soul per speciem expressam, quam reflexione sut ipsius supra se 
exprimit; for, he says, through its essence alone the soul is not conscious of itself, but 
attains to self-consciousness only when in itself it produces out of its essence the image 
(species) of itself (De Rerum Princ., qu. XV.). But Scotus’ doctrine of the will is entirely 
different from that of Thomas. Thomas teaches the determination of the will, Scotus its 
indetermination. Thomas affirms the doctrine of predestination in the strict, Augustinian 
sense of the term. Scotus teaches a doctrine of Synergism not far removed from Pela- 
gianism. According to Thomas, God commands what is good, because it is good; according 
to Scotus, the good is good, because God commands it. The relation between the under- 











CONTEMPORARIES OF THOMAS AND SCOTUS. 457 


standing and the will in us is an image of the same relation as it exists eminenter in God. 
The fundamental psychical powers in us are an image of the persons in God, and thus 
render possible for us a certain natural knowledge of the Trinity. Creation, incarnation, 
the necessity of accepting the merit of Christ as atonement for our guilt, are facts depending 
solely on the free-will of God, unconditioned by any rational necessity. He might have 
left the world uncreated. He might, if he had willed it, have united himself with any 
other creature instead of man. The suffering which Christ endured as a man is not neces- 
sarily, but only (according to the Scotist theory of acceptation) because he accepts it, an 
equivalent reckoned to the credit of the believer for the punishment made necessary by 
his guilt. Thus the pre-eminence ascribed by Scotus to the will over the reason in God 
and in man resolves itself in fact into the omnipotence of the arbitrary will of the Deity. 
The most noted of the disciples of Duns Scotus were Joh. de Bassolis, who seems to 
have taught before Occam a philosopher, whose doctrines he never mentions; Antonius 
Andreae, the ‘ Doctor dulcificus” (died about 1320); Franciscus de Mayronis, the “ Magister 
abstractionum” or “‘ Doctor illuminatus” (died A. D. 1325—his works were printed at Venice 
in 1520), who is said (this widely-accepted supposition has been disproved by Charles 
Thurot, in De lorganisation de lenseignement dans Université de Paris au moyen-dge, p. 150) 
in 1315 to have caused the rule for disputations at the Sorbonne (actus Sorbonici) to be 
promulgated, which provided that the defender of a thesis must reply from six o’clock 
in the morning till six in the evening to all objections which were made to it; Walter 
Burleigh (Burlaeus, born 1275, died about 1337), the “‘ Doctor planus et perspicuus” and the 
realistical opponent of Occam; and Nicolaus de Lyra, Petrus of Aquila, and others. 


§ 103. Of the contemporaries of Thomas of Aquino and Duns 
Scotus, the following are those who are of most importance as phi- 
losophers: Henry Goethals (of Muda, near Ghent, hence called Hen- 
ricus Gandavensis, born about 1217, died 1293), who defended, in 
opposition to the Aristotelianism of Albert and Thomas, a doctrine 
more allied to the Platonism of Augustine; Richard of Middletown 
(Ricardus de Mediavilla, born about 1300), a Franciscan, who fol- 
lowed more nearly the Scotist than the Thomist doctrine; Siger of 
Brabant (de Curtraco—died before 1300), who passed over from a 
type of doctrine akin to Scotism to Thomism; Petrus Hispanus of 
Lisbon (died 1277, as Pope John XXI.), whose Swnmulae Logicales 
were of considerable influence among the Scholastics, as a guide to 
the practice of logic; Roger Bacon (born at Ilchester 1214, died 1294), 
who became by his devotion to natural investigation a forerunner of 
Bacon of Verulam; and Raymundus Lullus (born 1234 on the island 
of Majorca, died 1315), who found for his fanciful theory of the com- 
bination of concepts, with a view to the conversion of the unbelieving 
and the reformation of the sciences, a great number of partisans (Lul- 
lists), even in later times, when the unsatisfying character of Scholas- 
ticism and an indefinable impulse toward the novel favored all sorts 
of quixotic attempts. In addition to the schools which acknowledged 


458 CONTEMPORARIES OF THOMAS AND SCOTUS. 


the authority of the Church, there arose anti-ecclesiastical thinkers, 
who regarded philosophical and theological truth as two different 
things, or even rejected the theology of the Church as untrue. 


Henrici Gandavensis Quodlibeta theologica, Paris, 1518, ete.; Summa quaestionum ordinarium, 
Paris, 1520; Summa theologiae, ibid. 1520, Ferrara, 1646. ΣΕΥ τα Huet treats of Henry of Ghent, in 
Recherches Titedovtl wes et critiques sur la vie, les owvrages et la doctrine de Henri de Gand, surnommé 
le docteur solennel, Ghent, 1888. 

Ricardi de Mediavilla comm. in quatuor libr, Sentent., Venice, 1489 and 1509, Brescia, 1591; Quod- 
libeta, Venice, 1507 and 1509, Paris, 1510 and 1529. 

The Summulae Logicales of Petrus Hispanus have been very often printed, beginning in 1480, at 
Cologne, Venice, Leipsic, ete.; see Prantl, Gesch. der Log., III., Leipsic, 1867, pp. 85-40. 

R. Baconis opus majus ad Clementem IV., ed. Sam. Jebb, London, 1738; Venice, 1750. Hjusdem 
epist. de secretis urtis et naturae operibus atque nuilitate magiae, Paris, 1542. Cousin discovered frag- 
ments of the Opus Minus, an epitome, made by Roger Bacon himself, of the Opus Majus, and the whole 
of an introductory work, the Opus Tertiwm (published by J. 8. Brewer in Rerum Brit. med. aevi script., 
London, 1860). On Roger Bacon, ef. Emile Charles, 20. B., Paris, 1861, and H. Siebert, Jnawg.-Diss., Mar- 
burg, 1861; cf. also an article on 10. B. in Gelzer’s Protest. Monatsbl., XXVII. No. 2, February, 1866, 
pp. 63-83. 

Raimundi Lulli opera ea, quae ad inventam ab ipso artem universalem pertinent, Strasburg, 1598, 
ete. Opera omnia, ed. Salzinger, Mayence, 1721-42. Cf. Jo. Henr. Altstddtii clavis artis Lullianae et 
verae logicae, Strasburg, 1609; Perroquet, Vie de 70. Lulle, Vendome, 1667. On Raymundus Lullus and 
the beginnings of the Catalonian Literature, A. Helfferich (Berlin, 1858) has written. The logic of Lullus is 
described minutely in Prantl’s Gesch. der Log., 111. pp. 145-177. 


Henry.of Ghent, surnamed ‘‘ Doctor solemnis,” adopting the Platonico-Augustinian form 
of doctrine, according to which the Idea represents the universal, affirmed that in the 
divine mind there existed only ideas of genera and species, and none of individuals. He 
denied the doctrine of Thomas of Aquinas, who taught that in God there was an idea of 
each particular object (‘‘idea hujus creaturae”); the divine knowledge of individuals is 
already contained in the knowledge of their genera. Henry of Ghent objected to the de- 
nomination of the matter of sensible objects as non-real and merely potential; he regarded 
this matter, rather, as a real substratum, capable of receiving forms. With Henry of 
Ghent were united Stephen Tempier, Robert Kilwardby, and, especially, William Lamarre, 
as early opponents of Thomism. 

Richard of Middletown opposed both the theory that the universal exists actually in 
individual objects and the doctrine that matter is the principle of individuation; he laid 
stress on the practicai character of theology and the non-demonstrableness by phildwapineal 
arguments of the mysteries of faith. 

Siger of Brabant, who taught at the Sorbonne, wrote a Commentary on the Prior Ana- 
lytics, and Quaestiones Logicales, and other logical works, extracts from which are given in 
the Hist. litteraire de la France, XXI. pp. 96-127. Cf. Prantl, Gesch. der Log., IIL. p. 234 
seq. Dante (Paradiso, X. ν. 136) mentions Siger as an excellent teacher. 

Petrus Hispanus, after the example of William Shyreswood (who, born at Durham, 
studied “at Oxford, afterward lived in Paris, and died in 1249 while Chancellor of Lincoln), 
and perhaps also of Lambert of Auxerre (about 1250, if indeed Lambert was the real 
author of the ‘‘ Swmma Lamberti,” which was very similar to the Compendium of Petrus 
Hispanus, and exists in MS. at Paris), expanded the logic of the schools by incorporating 
into it new grammatical and logical material. The much-used manual of Petrus Hispanus, 
“ Summulae Logicales,” presents logic in seven sections or “tractates.” Their titles are: 
1. De Enunciatione, 2. De Universalibus, 3. De Praedicamentis, 4. De Syllogismo, 5. De Locis 
Dialecticis, 6. De Fallaciis, 1. De Terminorum Proprietatibus (parva logicalia). The first six 


χὰ 


SARE 






Mess 








CONTEMPORARIES OF THOMAS AND SCOTUS. 459 


sections contain in substance the logic of Aristotle and Boéthius (the so-called “ logica 
antiqua,” which must be distinguished from the ‘‘vetus logica,” 7. e., the formerly known 
logic, the logic already known before 1140); the seventh section, on the contrary, contained 
the additions of the moderns (modernorum). This seventh section, on the “ properties 
of terms,” treated de supposttionibus (by the suppositio was understood the representa- 
tion by the concept of that which was contained in the extension of the concept, so that, 
6. g., omnis homo morialis est, stood for Cajus mortalis est, Titius mortalis est, etc.), de rela- 
tivis, de appellationibus, de ampliatione, and de restrictione (expanding or restricting the 
meaning of an expression), de distributione and de exponibilibus, which latter belonged also 
to the chapter entitled De dictionibus syncategorematicis (by which are to be understood the 
other parts of speech besides the noun and verb). The origin of these grammatico-logical 
speculations is questionable. That they were borrowed by the Western logicians from the 
‘* Synopsis of Psellus” (which, in the form in which it has come down to us, contains only 
the principal part of the doctrine of the suppositio, but may originally have contained the 
other parts of the seventh section of the Swmmulae) is (notwithstanding Prantl’s support 
of it) an untenable hypothesis (see above, the Note to § 95, p. 404). Some of the new 
terms and doctrines were formed with reference to passages in the then newly-known 
works of Aristotle and his Greek commentators, and, probably, also of Arabian logicians 
belonging to the first half of the thirteenth century; others, and apparently the greater 
number of them, are older, and it is probable that they arose in the course of the twelfth 
century through a combination of the grammatical tradition with the logical (6. g., suppo- 
sitio, according to Thurot’s hypothesis, from the grammatical use of the word suppositum in 
Priscian; in Priscian, 11. 15, is found the statement that the dialecticians recognized as 
parts of speech only the noun and the verb, and called other kinds of words “ syncate- 
᾿ goreumata, hoc est consignificantia”); yet, as to the origin of many terms, no sufficient 
evidence is at hand. 

Roger Bacon was educated at Oxford and Paris, being a pupil of Robertus Capito, 
Petrus de Mahariscuria (Meharicourt, in Picardy), the physicist, and others, and became 
subsequently a Franciscan monk. He preferred to study nature rather than bury himself 
in scholastic subtleties. He studied mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and optics. partly 
from Greek, Arabian, and Hebrew works, and partly by the personal observation of nature. 
Pope Clement IV. was his patron; but after the death of the latter he was obliged to atone 
for his opposition to the spirit of his times by many years of confinement. He did not 
succeed in diverting the interest of his contemporaries from metaphysics and directing it to 
physics and philology. . 

Raimundus Lullus (or Lullius) found a not insignificant number of partisans credulous 
enough to believe in the fanciful system whose merits he so vaingloriously vaunted. He 
was the author of an art of invention, which depended on the placing in different circles of 
various concepts, some formal, others material, so that, when the circles were turned, 
every possible combination was easily produced by mechanical means, presenting a motley 
conglomerate of sense and nonsense. Raimundus Lullus was also acquainted with the 
secret doctrine of the Cabala, which he attempted to employ in the interests of his intended 
improvement of science. He blamed Thomas for holding the doctrines of the Trinity and 
the incarnation to be indemonstrable; with his way of conducting ‘ proofs" and “ con- 
quering ” unbelievers, he found the demonstration of these dogmas not difficult. That the 
enthusiast met with applause needs no explanation. 

Even during the most flourishing periods of Scholasticism, there were never wanting 
anti-ecclesiastical philosophemes, which were derived from the Aristotelian philosophy, 
especially in the Averroistic interpretation of the latter. That the first acquaintance with 


400 WILLIAM OF OCCAM, THE RENEWER OF NOMINALISM. 


foreign philosophy led to heterodox ideas has already been remarked (§ 98). It was, per- 
haps, the same influence which enabled the dialectician, Simon of Tournay, at Paris (about 
1200), with equal facility (openly) to demonstrate the truth of the doctrines of the Church 
and (secretly) to show their untruth. It soon became a favorite practice with many to 
distinguish between philosophical truth (or whatever was directly inferable from the 
Aristotelian principles) and theological truth (harmony with the doctrines of the Church), 
which distinction, in the presence of the many unsustainable attempts to combine the two, 
had its perfect relative justification, but was a negation of the principle of Scholasticism, 
was condemned by the ecclesiastical authority, and failed in this period to become a ruling 
idea. This distinction flowed more particularly from Averroism (cf. Ern. Renan, Averroés 
et ! Averroisme, Ὁ. 213 seq.). Already, in the year 1240, Guillaume d@’ Auvergne, then Bishop 
of Paris, made several theorems which were borrowed from the Arabs (and probably from 
the work De Causis) the subject of official censure. In the year 1269 Etienne Tempier, then 
Archbishop of Paris, summoned an assembly of teachers of theology, by whom thirteen 
Averroistic propositions were examined and (in 1270) condemned. But the anti-ecclesias- 
tical doctrines continued to assert themselves. In the year 1276 Pope John Χ ΧΙ. censured 
the assertion that truth was twofold, and in 1277 Etienne Tempier found occasion to cen- 
sure propositions like the following, which were professed by philosophers at Paris: God 
is not triune and one, for trinity is incompatible with perfect simplicity; The world and 
humanity are eternal; The resurrection of the body must not be admitted by philosophers ; 
The soul, when separated from the body, cannot suffer by fire; Ecstatic states and visions 
take place naturally, and only so; Theological discourses are based on fables; A man, who 
is furnished with the moral and intellectual yirtues, has in himself all that is necessary to 
happiness (see the supplement to the fourth book of the editions of Petrus Lombardus; 
Du Boulay, Hist. univ. Paris., tom. III. pp. 397, 442; Charles du Plessis d’Argentré, Col- 
lectio judiciorum de novis erroribus, Paris, 1728, I. p. 175 seq.; Charles Thurot, De Vorgan. 
de Venseignement dans Vuniv. de Paris au m.-dge, Ὁ. 105 seq.). One of the chief seats of 
Averroism was Padua. In about the year 1500 the doctrine of the twofold character of 
truth prevailed among Averroists and Alexandrists (cf. below, Vol. II., § 3). 


§ 104. Preceded by Petrus Aureolus, the Franciscan (died 1321), 
and William Durand of St. Pourgain, the Dominican (died 138382), 
William of Occam, the “ Venerabilis Inceptor” (died April 7, 1847), 
following in his terminology the “modern” logic, renewed the doc- 
trine of Nominalism. The philosophical school which he thus 
founded, while in itself nearly indifferent with reference to the doc- 
\trine of the Church, acknowledged nevertheless the authority of the 
latter, but rendered it, at least in material respects, no positive ser- 
vices. Occam not merely, like Scotus, reduced the number of 
theological doctrines which, as Thomas had taught, were demon- 

strable by pure reason, but denied that there were any such. Even 
the existence and unity of God were, in his judgment, merely articles 
. of faith. With him the critical method rose to an independent rank. 
The Nominalism of Occam was rather a continuance of the contest 
against Realism, than a positive and elaborate system. The particu- 


— 


MY. Ack 


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WILLIAM OF OCCAM, THE RENEWER OF NOMINALISM, 461 


lar alone being recognized as real, and the universal being repre- 
sented as a mere conception of the thinking mind, great weight was 
laid on the external and internal perceptions, by which the particular 
is apprehended. With this doctrine prevailing, and with the co- 
operation of other influences tending in the same direction, it became 
easier than, when Realism prevailed, it had been to impose limits on 
Scholastic abstraction, and the way was prepared for an inductive 
investigation of external nature and of psychical phenomena. 


Petri Aureoli Verberii archiepisc. Aquensis commentar. in quatuor libros sententiarum, Rome 
1596-1605. Cf. Prantl, Gesch. d. Log., III. pp. 819-921. 

Durandi de St. Porciano comm. in magistr, sentent., Paris, 1508, Lyons, 1568, Antwerp, 1576. Cf. 
Prantl, III. pp. 292-297. 

Guil. Occam, Quodlibeta septem, Paris, 1487, Strasburg, 1491; Summa totius logices, or Tractatus, 
logices in tres partes divisus, Paris, 1488, Venice, 159i, Oxford, 1675; Quaestiones in libros Physicorum, 
Strasburg, 1491, 1506; Quaestiones et decisiones in quatuor libros sententiarum, Lyons, 1495, ete. Centi- 
logium theologicum, ibid. 1496; Hapositio aurea super totam artem veterem, videlicit in Porphyrii 
praedicabilia et Arist. praedicamenta, Bologna, 1496. Occam’s Disputatio super potestate ecclesiastica 
praelatis atque principibus terrarum commissa was published by Melchior Goldast (it had been pre, 
viously published in Paris in 1598) in the Monarchia, Vol. I. p. 135 seq., and his Defensoriwm, addressed ta 
John XX., by Ed. Brown, in the Appendix to the Fascic. rerwm expetendarum et fugiendarum, p. 436 
seq. Οὗ, on him, Rettberg’s article on Occam and Luther, in the Stud. wu. Krit., 1839, W. A. Schreiber, 
Die polit. u. relig. Doctrinen unter Ludwig dem Baier, Landshut, 1858, Prantl, Der Universalienstreit 
am 13 und 14 Jahrhundert, in the Reports of the Ph. Cl. of the Munich Academy, 1864, I. 1, pp. 58-67, 
and Gesch. der Log., III. pp. 827-420, and, on his and in general on the nominalistic doctrine of God, 
A. Ritschl, in the Jahrbiicher fiir deutsche Theologie, No. 1, 1868. 


Pierre Aureol (Petrus Aureolus), born at Verberie-sur-Oise, and surnamed ‘ Doctor 
abundans” or ‘‘ Doctor facundus,” professed a conceptualism which excluded from the 
sphere of real existence all genera and species (Jn l. pr. Sent., dist. 23, art. 2: manifestum 
est quod ratio hominis et animalis prout distinguitur a Socrate, est fabricata per intellectum nec 
est aliud nisi conceptus;—non enim fecit has distinctas rationes natura in existentia actuali). He 
enounced the principle subsequently known as the Law of Parcimony (Jn Sent., IT., dist. 
12, qu. 1: non est philosophicum, pluralitatem rerum ponere sine causa; frustra enim fit per 
plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora). He held that we perceive things themselves without 
the intervention of ‘ formae speculares” (Ibid.: unde patet, quomodo res ipsae conspiciuntur 
tn mente, et illud, quod intuemur, non est forma alia specularis, sed ipsamet res, habens esse appa- 
rens, et hoc est mentis conceptus, sive notitia objectiva). 

Durand de St. Pourcain (Durandus de St. Porciano), who has been mentioned above 
(p. 453) among the Thomists, began to teach in Paris in 1313. He was summoned to 
Rome some time after, became Bishop of Puy-en-Velay in 1318, and died in 1332. It is 
probable that his teaching at Paris preceded that of Occam, who about 1320 had acquired 
a reputation in that city, and hence that the opposition which he finally waged against 
Thomist opinions, which at first he had accepted, is not (with Rousselot, whose view is 
refuted by Hauréau, Ph. Sc., IT. p. 410 seq.) to be ascribed to the influence of Occam. He 
taught as follows: The universal and individual natures form together one and the same 
object, and are distinguished only by the manner in which we apprehend them; the genus 
and species, in other words, express in an indefinite manner that which the individual 
presents definitely. (This is an anticipation of the doctrine of Wolff, the Leibnitzian, that 
the individual, in distinction from the generic or specific concept resulting from abstrac- 
tion, is that which is in all respects determined. The words of Durand are as follows: 


402 WILLIAM OF OCCAM, THE RENEWER OF NOMINALISM. 


Universale est unum solum secundum conceptum, singulare vero est unum secundum esse reale. 
Nam sicut actio intellectus facit universale, sic actio agentis singularis terminatur ad sixgulare.— 
Non oportet praeter naturam et principia naturae quaerere alia principia individui.—Nihil est 
principium individuationis, nist quod est principium naturae et quidditatis). There exist only 
individuals; Socrates is an individual by the very fact of his existence (Jn 1. 11. Sent., dist. 
3). The abstraction of the universal from the particular is not the operation of a distinct 
active intellect, as Averroés erroneously supposed, but of the same faculty which is affected 
by external impressions. Nor is it more true that the universal exists before the action 
of the intellect (cntellectio or operatio intelligendi). On the contrary, the universal is the 
result of this action, the object from the contemplation of which it is derived being sepa- 
rated in our thoughts from the individualizing conditions (In 1. I. Sent., dist. 3, qu. 5: 
universale non est primum objectum intellectus nec prae existit intellectiont, sed est aliquid forma- 
tum per operationem intelligendi, per quam res secundum considerationem abstrahitur a condi- 
tionibus individuantibus). 

William, born at Occam in the county of Surrey, in England, a Franciscan and pupil of 
Duns Scotus, and afterward teacher at Paris, took sides, in the contest of the hierarchy 
against the political power, with the latter. Pursued by the Pope, he fled to Lewis of 
Bavaria, who protected him, and to whom he said: ‘‘Do thou defend me by the sword, 
and I will defend thee with my pen” (tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo). As 
the renewer of Nominalism, he received from the later Nominalists the title of “ Venerabilis 
Inceptor ;” he was also called by his followers ‘‘ Doctor invincibilis.” 

William of Occam founds his rejection of Realism on the principle: Entities must not 
be unnecessarily multiplied (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). He combats 
the realizing and hypostatizing of abstractions (Suffictwnt singularia, et ita tales res univer- 
sales omnino frustra ponuntur). From the fact that our knowledge depends on our posses- 
sion of universal conceptions, it does not follow that the universal as such has reality. It 
is enough that the individuals, which in the formation of judgments are designated or 
represented together by the same concept, exist realiter (scientia est de rebus singularibus, 
quod pro ipsis singularibus termini supponunt. The termini, ὅροι, are, according to Petrus 
Hispanus, compositi ex voce et significatione. The Nominalists were hence called also Ter- 
minists. Occam employs supponere pro aliquo, taken intransitively, as synonymous with 
stare pro aliquo. This usage, as Thurot has shown, had become customary at least as 
early as the year 1200. When supponere is used transitively, the termini are the sup- 
ponentia and the individuals the supposita.) The hypothesis of the real existence of 
the universal, argues Occam, leads, in whatever form it may be expressed, to absurdities. 
If (with Plato) independent existence be ascribed to the universal, the effect is to make 
of the latter an individual object. If it be represented as existent in individual things, 
so that in reality, and without reference to our thinking, it is distinguished from the 
individual, then the universal is pluralized or multiplied in proportion to the number of 
individuals, and is consequently individualized; but a ‘‘formal” distinction, supposed to 
exist in the individual object as such, were of necessity a real one, and can therefore not 
be assumed to exist. But if, on the contrary, the universal be asserted so to exist in the 
particular, that only the process of abstraction performed by us can give it separate reality, 
then it does not exist as universal in the particular, for thinking does not determine the 
nature of the external object, but only generates the concept in us. The universal, there- 
fore, does not exist in things, but only in the thinking mind. It is a ‘‘mental conception, 
signifying uniyocally several singulars ” (conceptus mentis, significans univoce plura singularia). 
It exists in the mind, not substantially (subjective), but as a representation (olyective), while 
| outside of the mind it is only a word, or, in general, a sign of whatever kind, representing 








WILLIAM OF OCCAM, THE RENEWER OF NOMINALISM. 4638 


conventionally several objects. Each thing is as such individual (quaelibet res eo ipso quod 
est, est haec res). The cause of each thing is, by that very fact, at the same time the cause 
of its individual existence. The act of abstraction, by which the universal is formed in the 
mind, does not presuppose an activity of the understanding or will, but is a spontaneous, 
second act, by which the first act, 7. e., perception, or the image left by perception in the 
memory (habitus derelictus ex primo actu), is naturally followed, as soon as two or more 
similar representations are present (In Sent., I., Dist. 2; Summa tot. log., ch. 16). The 
Aristotelian doctrine of categories is treated by Occam as resting on a division, not of 
things, but of words. The categories have, according to him, primarily a grammatical 
reference, and it is to this character of the categories that (like Trendelenburg, in more 
recent times) he directs particular attention. 

Just as mental representations do not exist substantially in us, so the so-called Ideas 
do not exist substantially, or as parts of the divine essence, in God. They are simply the 
knowledge which God has of things; and they are his knowledge of particular, concrete 
things, since it is only these that exist realiter (ideae sunt primo singularium et non sunt 
specierum, quia ipsa singularia soia sunt extra producibilia et nulla alia). ΑἸ this, however, 
is only true provided it is at all permitted us to represent to ourselves the divine knowl- 
edge after the analogy of our own. 

Since all that exists is individual, it follows that intuition is the natural form of our 
cognition (Jn Sentent., I., dist. 3, qu. 2: nihil potest naturaliter cognosci in se nisi cognoscatur 
intuitive). By intuitive knowledge, Occam understands a knowledge by which we are 
made to know whether a thing is or is not; the judgment itself is then made by the intel- 


lect. The act of judgment (actus judicativus) presupposes the act of apprehension (actus | 
apprehensivus). Abstracted knowledge, on the contrary, justifies no judgment in a question | 


of existence or non-existence. Yet the most certain knowledge is not obtained through 
the senses; through them we receive only signs of things, which are indeed connected 
with the latter, but are not necessarily similar to them, just as, for example, smoke is a 
natural sign of fire, or groaning of pain, without its being true that smoke is similar to fire 
or groaning to pain. (Words are arbitrary signs of the conceptions of the mind, depending 
on human agreement, συνθήκη, and are therefore only signs of signs and, indirectly, of 
things.) In judging of the existence of external objects deception is possible. The in- 
tuitive knowledge of the intellect concerning our own internal states is more certain than 
all sense-perception (Jntellectus noster pro statu isto non tantum cognoscit sensibilia, sed etiam 
in particulart et intuitive cognoscit aliqua intellectibilia, quae nullo modo cadunt sub sensu, non 
plus quam substantia separata cadit sub sensu, cujusmodi sunt intellectiones, actus voluntatis, 
delectatio, tristitia et hujusmodi, quae potest homo experiri inesse sibi, quae tamen non sunt senst- 
bilia nobis, nec sub aliquo sensu cadunt, In I. Sent., Prol., qu. 1). But only the states, not the 


a 


essence of the soul are known in this way. Whether sensations and feelings, and intellec- | 
tive and volitional acts are the work of an immaterial Form, we do not know by experience, 


and the proofs offered on behalf of such an hypothesis are uncertain (Quodl., I., qu. 10). 
But Occam by no means restricts knowledge to that which is intuitive. On the con- 
trary, he affirms that science is the evident knowledge of the necessarily true, which 
knowledge can be generated by the agency of syllogistical thinking (éb., qu. 2). The fun- 
damental principles are obtained from experience by induction. Occam does not, however, 
show how it is possible for apodictical knowledge to rest on the basis of experience (a 
possibility that is founded in the regularity, or conformity to law, of the real world itself, 
the knowledge of which is taken into our consciousness through processes of perception 
and thought regulated by the norms of logic), and from his stand-point it was impossible 
to show this. Consequently he was not protected against the (not less plausible than false) 


464 LATER SCHOLASTICS UNTIL THE RENEWAL OF PLATONISM. 


objection of the subjective a priori philosophers (an objection which, in more recent times, 
has been advanced against his doctrine by Tennemann, the disciple of Kant, among others), 
namely, that the principles on which the generalization of experiences depends cannot 
themselves be derived from experience. 

To the identification of the thinking mind (anima intellectiva) with the feeling soul 
(anima sensitiva) and with the soul as form-giving principle of the body (forma corporis) 
Occam is unfriendly. The sensitive soul is extended, he teaches, and is joined circwm- 
scriptive with the body, as the form of the latter, so that its parts dwell in separate parts 
of the body. But the intellective soul is another substance, separable from the body and 
joined with it difinitive, so that it is entirely present in every part. Occam’s argument for 
the (ancient Aristotelian) doctrine of the separate substantial existence of the intellect 
(νοῦς) is founded on the antagonism of sense and reason, which, in Occam’s opinion, is 
inconceivable as existing in one and the same substance. 

Occam’s principles could not lead to a rational theology, since all knowledge which 
transcends the sphere of experience was relegated by him to the sphere of mere faith. 
God, teaches Occam, is not cognizable by intuition; nor (as the ontological argument sup- 
poses) does his existence follow from the conception which we have of him (ex terminis) ; 
only an a posteriori proof, and that not a rigorous one, is possible. That the series of finite 
causes cannot contain an infinite number of terms, but that it implies God as a first cause, 
is not strictly demonstrable; a plurality of worlds, with different authors, is conceivable; 
the most perfect being is not necessarily infinite, ete. Nevertheless, Occam considers that 
the existence of God is indeed rendered probable on rational grounds ( Centil. theol., 1 seq.); 
but, for the rest, he declares that the “articles of faith” have not even the advantage of 
probability for the wise of this world and especially for those who trust to the natural 
reason (‘pro supientibus mundi et praecipue innitentibus rationi naturali”). The precepts of 
morals are not, in the view of Occam (who in this agrees with Scotus), in themselves 
necessary , 1t is conceivable, that God, if his will had been different, would have sanctioned, 
as being just and good, other principles than those which we are now taught to consider 
as the foundation of justice and good. Nor is the human will subordinate to the under- 
standing. That the doctrime of the Trinity, according to which the one divine essence is 


' entirely present in each of the three divine persons, implies the truth of Realism, is ex- 


pressly admitted by Occam (Jn Sent., I., dist. 2, qu. 4); but he is contented that in relation 
to subjects like this only the authority of the Bible and of Christian tradition, and not the 
principles of experimental science, should be accepted. The will to believe the indemon- 
strable is meritorious. 

With Occam and his successors, the Scholastic axiom of the conformity of faith to 
reason gave place before what till their time was but a sporadically (see above, § 103, 
p. 460) appearing consciousness of their discrepancy. This consciousness led, among a por- 
tion of those who philosophized, to the postulation of two mutually contradicting kinds of 
truth, and those who adopted this postulate concealed, under a semblance of submission to 
the Church, their real espousal of the cause of philosophical truth. Mystics and reformers, 
on the contrary, were led by the same cause to take sides against the reason of the schools 
and to assert the claims of unreflecting faith. 


§ 105. Among the Scholastics of the latest period, when Nominal- 
ism, renewed, was acquiring more and more the supremacy, the most 
noteworthy are John Buridan, Rector of the University of Paris in 
1327 (died after 1350), and of importance for his investigations con- 











LATER SCHOLASTICS UNTIL THE RENEWAL OF PLATONISM. 465 


cerning the freedom of the will and his logical text-book; Albertus de 
Saxonia, who taught at Paris about 1350-1360; Marsilius (or Mar- 
celius) of Inghen (died 1392), who taught at Paris about 1864-13877, 
and afterward at Heidelberg; Peter of Ailly (1350-1425), the Nomi- 
nalist, who defended the doctrine of the Church, but gave precedence 
to the Bible rather than to Christian tradition, and to the Council 
rather than to the Pope, and who sought in philosophy to steer be- 
tween skepticism and dogmatism; Raymundus of Sabunde, a Spanish 
physician and theologian, and teacher of theology at Toulouse, who 
(about A. p. 1334-36, or perhaps still earlier) sought in a rational, yet, 
in some respects, rather mystical manner, to demonstrate the harmony 
between the book of nature and the Bible; and, lastly, Gabriel Biel 
(died in 1495), the Occamist, whose merit lay not in any original 
advancement of philosophical thought effected by him, but only in his 
clear and faithful presentation of the nominalistic doctrine. Of the 
Mystics of this later period, who for the most part are of more impor- 
tance in the history of religion than in that of philosophy, d’Ailly’s 
pupil and friend, Johannes Gerson (1363-1429), may here be men- 
tioned, on account of his attempted combination of Mysticism with 
Scholasticism. 


Joh. Buridan, Summa de Dialectica, Paris, 1487, Compendium Logicae, Venice, 1489, Quaestiones in 
octo libros phys., De Anima, Parva Naturalia, Paris, 1516, In Arist. Metaph., Paris, 1518, Quaestiones in 
decem libros ethic., Paris, 1489, and Oxford, 1637, Jn Polit, Arist. Paris, 1500, and Oxford, 1640. 

Alberti de Saxonia Quaestiones in libros de Coelo et de Mundo, Venice, 1497. 

Marsilii Quaestiones supra quatuor libros sententiarum, Strasburg, 1501. 

Petri de Alliaco Quaestiones super quatuor libros sentent., Strasburg, 1490. Tractatus et sermones, 
¢bid, 1490. 

G. Bielii Collectorium ex Occamo, Tiibingen, 1512. Gabriel Byel in quatuor Sententiarwm, I. 
Tibingen, 1501. Cf. Linsenmann, Gabriel Biel und die Anfange der Universitat zw Tiibingen in the 
Theol, Quartalschrift, 1865, pp. 195-226; G. Biel, Der letzte Scholastiker, und der Nominalismus, ibid, 
pp. 449-481 and 601-676. 

Gersonis Opera, Cologne, 1483, Strasburg, 1488-1502, Paris, 1521, Paris, 1606, and ed. by du Pin, An- 
twerp, 1706. Of Gerson treat, among others, Engelhardt, De Gersonio mystico, Erl., 1825. Lecuy, Vie de 
G., Paris, 1885, Ch. Jourdain, Paris, 1883, C. Schmidt, Strasburg, 1839, Mettenleiter, Augsburg, 1857, and 
Joh. Baptist Schwab, Wurzburg, 1859. 

Raymundi Theologia naturalis sive liber creaturarum was printed two or three times before 1485, 
then at Strasburg in 1496, Lyons, 1507, Paris, 1509, etc., and recently, Sulzbach, 1852 (but without the pro- 
logue named in the index), his Dialogi de natura hominis (a summary of the preceding work) at Lyons, 
ist edition, 1568. Cf. Montaigne, Zssais, 11. 12. Among those who have written of Raymundus are Fr. 
Holberg, De theol. nat. R. de S., Halle, 1843, David Matzke, Die natiirliche Theologie des R. v. δι. Breslau, 
1846, M. Huttler, Die Religionsphilosophie des R. v. S., Augsburg, 1851, C. C. L. Kleiber, De PF. vita et 
scriptis (Progr. of the Dorotheenst. Realschule), Berlin, 1856, Fr. Nitzsch, Quaestiones Raimundanae, in 
Niedner’s Zettschr. 7. hist. Theol., 1859, No. 3, pp. 8938-485, and C. Schaarschmidt in Herzog’s Theol. Realenc. 
Vol. XII. 1860, pp. 571-577. 


John Buridan, a pupil of Occam, discussed only the problems of logic, metaphysics, and 
ethics, ar and not those belonging specifically to theology. In his Logic he sought particu- 
larly to teach how to find the middle term, which could be conceived as a sort of bridge 


466 LATER SCHOLASTICS UNTIL THE RENEWAL OF PLATONISM. 


between the termini extremi, and since, according to Arist., Anal. Post., I. 34, it is in the 
quick discovery of middle terms that quickness of intellect is manifested, this introduction 
to the practice of logic, which might be of service to the more obtuse, was called pons 
asinorum (according to Sanctacrucius, Dial. ad mentem Scoti, I. 3, 11, ap. Tennemann, 
Gesch. der Philos., VIII. p. 916). Buridan declared it impossible (In Eth. Νῖο., III. qu. 1 
seq.) to decide the question as to whether the will, when under the influence of evenly- 
balanced motives, can with equal facility decide in favor of or against a given action; to 
answer it affirmatively (doctrine of Indeterminism) were to contradict the principle, that 
when all the conditions requisite to a thing (e. g., to a decision in favor of a proposed 
action) are present, the thing itself (e. g., the decision supposed) must follow, and that the 
same conditions admit only one and the same result; but to deny it (Determinism) is to 
contradict the moral consciousness of responsibility. (In this reasoning the fact was over- 
looked, that the very quality of will which gives character to the decision is itself the 
subject of moral judgment, and that only an external causality, a necessity obstructing the 
will, whether this be an external or a psychical compulsion, and not the causality grounded 
in the will itself, the inner necessity which is contained in its own nature destroys the 

| freedom of the will.) The oft-cited illustration of the ‘‘ass of Buridan,” which stands mo- 

\ tionless between two equally attractive bundles of hay, or between fodder and water, being 

\ drawn with equal force in both directions, has not been found in his works. The argument 
(as Thurot remarks) is derived from Arist., De Coelo, II. 13, p. 295 b, 13; the “asinus” was 
added by the Scholastics (and, as it appears, by some of Buridan’s opponents). 

Albert of Saxony belongs to the more distinguished teachers at the University of Paris 
after the middle of the fourteenth century. His labors were confined chiefly to logic (and 
especially to the ‘‘modern” doctrine entitled De Suppositionibus) and physics. A note- 
worthy passage occurs in his exposition of the De Coelo (II., gu. 21), where he mentions 
that one of his teachers appeared to have held that the theory of the motion of the earth 
and the immobility of the heavens could not be proved incorrect. His own opinion was, 
that even were all other arguments against that theory fully met by the counter-reasoning 
of his teacher, yet the relative positions of the planets and the eclipses of the sun and moon 
were inexplicable by the theory. 

Marsilius of Inghen taught, first at Paris, then at the University of Heidelberg, of which 
he was one of the founders, the nominalistic doctrine of Durand and Occam. 

Pierre d’Ailly (Petrus de Alliaco) labored in his Commentary on the Sentences (I. 1, 1), 
while discussing the preliminary questions respecting the possibility of knowledge, to 
demonstrate the proposition (of Occam), that self-knowledge is more certain than the per- 
ception of external objects. He argues: I cannot be deceived with regard to the fact of 
my own existence; but it is conceivable that my belief in the existence of external objects 
is an erroneous belief, for the sensations, on which it is grounded, might be produced in 
rae by God's almighty power, even if there were no external objects; or God might permit 
me to retain these sensations after he had destroyed their external causes. Our conviction 
of the reality of the objects of perception rests, according to Peter, on the postulate that 
the ordizary course of nature and the divine agency will remain in the future what they 
have been in the past, and this conviction is practically or subjectively sufficient. Peter 
admits also that logic, or the science of inference, which presupposes the principle of con- 
tradiction, is in practice a source of scientific certainty; he adds that the existence of a 
science of mathematics is a sufficient refutation of him who denies the possibility of such 
certainty. In regard to the ordinary proofs of God's existence, he expresses the opinion, 
in agreement with Occam, that they are not logically binding, although sufficient to estab- 
ish a probability. 





GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 467 


Other Nominalists, who more or less distinguished themselves, were Robert Holcot, 
the Dominican (died a. D. 1349), who so far separated philosophical from theological truth; 
as to teach that from the premises of philosophy their pure consequence, unmodified by 
any side reference to the interests of theology, might and must be drawn; Gregory of 
Rimini (died 1358), who was influential as a General of the Augustinian Order; the mathe- 
maticians, Richard Suinshead or Suisset (about 1350) and Henry of Hessen (died 1397); 
John of Mercnria, who deduced from Determinism the (supposed) consequence that he 
who succumbs under an irresistible temptation does not sin, and that sin itself, as being 
willed by God, is rather good than bad (these propositions were condemned in the year 
1347 by the University of Paris, which had already (1339) proscribed Occam’s books and 
(1340) condemned Nominalism); Nicolaus of Autricuria, who in 1348 was forced to recall 
his attacks on Aristotle, together with his skeptical theses, which were founded on 
Nominalism, and his doctrine of the eternity of the world; and, finally, Gabriel Biel, who 
produced a summary of the doctrines of Occam, and was the so-called “last Scholastic,” 
and whose nominalistic doctrine exerted a not inconsiderable influence on Luther and 
Melancthon. At Paris, in 1473, all teachers were bound by oath to teach Realism; but 
in 148] the nominalistic doctrine was already again tolerated. 

The attempt of Raymundus of Sabunde to prove the doctrines of Christianity from the 
revelation of God in nature had no imitators. Setting out with the consideration of the 
four stages designated as mere being, life, sensation, and reason, Raymundus (who agrees 
with the Nominalists in regarding self-knowledge as the most certain kind of knowledge) 
proves by ontological, physico-teleological, and moral arguments (the latter based on the 
principle of retribution), the existence and trinity of God, and the duty of grateful love to 
God, who first loved us. His work culminates in the mystical conception of a kind of love 
to God, by which the lover is enabled to grow into the essence of the loved. 

Since the nominalistic philosophy, in the majority of its representatives, though not 
indeed hostile to theology, scarcely rendered it any positive services—being, rather, almost 
indifferent in regard to it—it was natural that the theologians should assume a corre- 
sponding attitude in reference to philosophy. Gerson (John Charlier of Gerson), the Mystic, 
himself an adherent of Nominalism and seeking to reconcile theology with Scholastic phi- 
losophy (‘‘concordare theologiam cum nostra scholastica”’), exhorts his followers to give but 
a moderate attention to secular science and philosophy; the truth could be learned only 
through revelation. Repentance and faith, says Gerson, lead more surely than all human 
inquiry to trne knowledge. Neither Plato nor Aristotle is the right guide for him who is 
secking his salvation. Better than all rational knowledge is obedience to the divine ex- 
hortation: Poenitemini et credite Evangelio! Such also was the attitude first assumed by 
Protestantism toward philosophy. 


δ 106.* When Scholasticism had already passed its period of 
bloom, there grew up on German soil a peculiar branch of Mysticism, 
which exerted an indirect or a direct influence on the further develop- 
ment of science down to the most recent times. German Mysticism 
was developed chiefly in sermons from the German pulpit. Ser- 
monizing was cultivated with especial ardor by the members of the 


*) This paragraph is from the pen of my friend Dr. Adolf Lasson, of whose thorough studies in the 
department of Medieval Mysticism I am glad and grateful that this Compendium should reap the 
benefit— UEBerwee. 


408 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


| Dominican Order. The object of the preachers was to present the 
system of the schools, as exhibited in the writings of Albert the Great 
and Thomas, in a manner which should take hold of the heart of 
every individual among the people. With the transference of science 
into the German language, and with the attempt of preachers to 
assume a popular style, the prevalent tendency toward the logical, 
and toward the ingenious combination of fundamental ideas in the 
form of syllogistic proofs, fell away; in its place came speculation, 
which, giving to the theorems of faith spiritual vitality, stripped them 
ot the unyielding form of dogmas, and, viewing them from the stand- 
point of one vitalizing, central idea, spread them as a synthetic whole 
before the hearts and wills of the hearers. This central idea was the 
conception, still latent in the systems of Albert and Thomas, of the 
essential unity of the soul in reason and will with God, a conception 
which here, where a system of ideas took rather the form of an unity 
felt internally than of a whole consisting of logically-reasoned proofs, 
could be expressed freely and without regard to ulterior consequences, 
and around which were gathered all the kindred elements contained 
in the entire previous development of Christian science. In partic. 
ular, the Platonic and Neo-Platonic elements, which were not wanting 
even with Albert and Thomas, were now placed in the foreground ; 
an extreme Realism was everywhere tacitly presupposed. It was not 
the Church and its teaching, but Christianity, as they understood it, 


that the Mystics aimed to advance by edifying speculation and to 


render comprehensible by the transcendent use of the reason. The 
author and perfecter of this entire development was Master Eckhart. 
Appealing on almost all points to the doctrines of earlier speculators, 
in particular to those of the Pseudo-Areopagite, to Augustine, and to 
Thomas, he nevertheless, with bold originality, remolded the old in a 
new spirit, in many cases anticipating the labor of subsequent times. 
At all events, notwithstanding the censure of the Church, which fell 
on him, he produced the deepest impression on his contemporaries. 
Familiarly acquainted with Aristotle, and with the Scholastie phi- 
losophy founded on Aristotle, he by no means assumed a position 
hostile to the science of his times. He only rejected in many cases 
its form for purposes of his own, while he aimed to reveal its true 
sense. Theoretical knowledge was, in his view, the means by which 
man must become a partaker of divine knowledge; but, in Neo- 
Platonic fashion, he regarded, as the highest form in which reason 






Ss AH Se rg ar GME 


ui 


2 eS μα, FR Se 











GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 469 


manifests itself, an immediate intuition transcending all finiteness 
and all determination. Earnestly as he pursued in sermon and 
treatise the end of edification and awakening, he was animated not 
Jess powerfully by a purely theoretical interest. 

In the doctrine of Eckhart knowledge is represented as a real 
union of Subject with Object; only in knowledge is the absolute 
seized upon and with joy possessed. In opposition to the teaching of 
Duns Scotus, the will is treated as subordinate to the knowing faculty, 
and extreme emphasis is laid on the presence in the divine nature of 
the element of rational necessity. Reason finds its satisfaction only 
in a last, all-including unity, in which all distinctions vanish. The 
Absolute, or Deity, remains as such without personality and without 
work, concealed in itself. Enveloped in it is God, who is from eter- 
nity, and who has the power of revealing himself. He exists as the 
one divine nature, which is developed into a trinity of persons in the 
act of self knowledge. In this eternal act the divine nature beholds 
itself as areal object of its own cognition, and in the love and joy 
which this act excites in itself it eternally takes back itself (as object 
of cognition) into itself (as subject of cognition). The Subject in this 
knowledge is the Father, the Object is the Son, the love of both for 
each other is the Spirit. The Son, as he is eternally begotten by the 
Father, involves at once the ideal totality of things. The world is 
eternally in God as a world of ideas or antetypes, and is withal 
simple in its nature. The manifold and different natures of finite 
things arose first through their creation in time out of nothing. Out 
of God, the creature is a pure nothing; time and space and the plu- 
rality, which depends on them, are nothing in themselves. The duty 
of man as a moral being is to rise beyond this nothingness of the 
creature, and by direct intuition to place himself in immediate union 
with the Absolute; by means of the human reason all things are to 
be brought back into God. Thus the circle of the absolute process, 
which is at the same time absolute rest, is gone through and the last 
end is reached, the annihilation of all manifoldness in the mystery 
and repose of the Absolute.—The fundamental conceptions of Eck- 
hart’s doctrine were not, in his time, further developed in a scientific 
manner by any one. The most influential representatives of Mys- 
ticism in his extremely numerous school were, Johann Tauler, Hein- 
rich Suso, the unknown author of a small work entitled “ 4 German 
Theology,’ and Johann Rusbroek. 


470 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


Deutsche Mystiker d. 14 Jahrhunderts, edited by F. Pfeiffer, Vol. I. Leipsic, 1845; Vol. 11. 2béd. 1857, 
Vol. IL. contains Meister Eckhart. Until the publication of this work only the sermons and treatises 
contained in the appendix to the edition of Zauler’s Sermons (Basel, 1521) were known as works of Eck- 
hart. Pfeiffer’s extremely thankworthy edition, although containing only a part of the works named by 
Trithemius (De Seript. Eccles.) and examined by Nicolaus Cusanus (Opp., ed. Basil., p. 11) furnishes suffi- 
cient material for a survey of the ideas of the “ Master.” Much, that must now be ascribed to Eckhart, 
passed formerly under Tauler’s and Rusbroek’s names. In many cases the text is sorely mutilated, and 
many passages are rendered unintelligible. 

Concerning the German Mystics, cf. in addition to the works above cited (p. 389) and the works on the 
History of Dogmas (p. 263), the following: Gottfr. Arnold, Historia et descriptio theologiue mysticae, 
Frankfort, 1702. De Wette, Christliche Sittenlehre, 11. 2, Berlin, 1821. Rosenkranz, Die deutsche Mystik, 
zur Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur, Konigsberg, 1836. Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reforma- 
tion, Vol. Il. Hamburg, 1842, pp. 18-284. Ch. Schmidt, Htudes sur le mysticisme allemand (Mémoires de 
Wacad. des sciences mor. et polit., t. 11. p. 240, Paris, 1847). Wilh. Wackernagel, Gesch. der deutschen 
Litteratur, Abth. 2, Basel, 1858, pp. 831-341. Boehringer, Kirchengeschichte in Biographien (11. 3: Die 
deutschen Mystiker), Ziirich, 1855. Hamberger, Stimmen aus dem Heiligthun der christl. Mystik und 
Theosophie, 2 parts, Stuttgard, 1857, Greith, Die Mystik im Predigerorden, Freiburg in Br., 1861. 6. A. 
Heinrich, Les mystiques allemands au moyen-dge, in the Revue d’Economie Chrétienne, November, 1866, 
p. 926 seq. C. Schmidt, Nicolaus von Basel, Vienna, 1866. T. Tietz, Die Mystik und ihr Verhiliniss zur 
Reformation, in the Zeitschr. fiir die luther. Theologie, 1868, pp. 617-638. W. Treger, Zur Geschichte der 
deutschen Mystik, in the Zeitschr. fiir histor. Theol., 1869, pp. 1-145. 

On Eckhart, ef. C. Schmidt, in Theol. Stud. u. Krit., 1839, p. 663 seq.; Martensen, Dfeister Εἰ, Ham- 
burg, 1842; Steffensen, Ueber Meister Ε΄. τι. d. Mystik, in Gelzer’s Protest. Monatsbldtter, 1858, p. 267 seq. ; 
Petr. Gross, De E. philosopho (diss. inaug.), Bonn, 1858; R. Heidrich, Das theol. System des Meisters EF. 
(Progr.), Posen, 1864; Joseph Bach, Meister E., der Vater der deutschen Speculation, Vienna, 1864; W. 
Preger, Zin neuer Tractat Meister Es (Ztschr. f. histor. Theol., 1864, p. 163 seq.), and Kritische Studien 
zu Meister E. (ibid. 1866, p. 453 seq.); E. Béhmer, Meister ΑΕ. (Giesebrecht’s Damaris, 1865, p. 52 seq.) ; 
Wahl, Die Seelenlehre Meister Es (Theol. Stud. τι. Krit., 1868, pp. 273-296); Ad. Lasson, Meister Eckhart, 
der Mystiker, Berlin, 1868; W. Treger, Meister HZ. und die Inquisition, Munich, 1569. 

The most important editions of Tauler’s Sermons are those of Leipsic, 1498, Basel, 1521 and 1522, 
Cologne, 1543; translated into Latin by Surius, Cologne, 1548; translated into modern German, Frankfort- 
on-the-Main, 1826 and 1864, 3 parts. The book: Von der Nachfolge des armen Lebens Christi was pub- 
lished by Schlosser, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1833 and 1864. Cf. C. Schmidt, Joh. Tuuler, Hamburg, 1841 ; 
Rudelbach, Christl. Biogr., Leipsic, 1849, p. 187 seq.; F. Bahring, Joh. Tauler und die Gottesfreunde, 
Hamburg, 1853; E. Bohmer, Nicolaus v. Basel u. Tauler (Giesebrecht'’s Damaris, 1869, p. 148 seq.). 

Suso’s works appeared at Augsburg in 1482, 1512, etc.; translated into Latin by Surius. Cologne, 1559, 
ed. Diepenbrock, Regensb., 1829, 1837, 1854. Die Briefe Heinrich Suso’s, from a MS. of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, ed. Wilh. Preger, Leipsic, 1867. Cf. C. Schmidt, Theol. Stud. u. Krit., 1843, p. 885 seq.; Bohmer, 
Giesebrecht’s Damaris, 1865, p. 321 seq.; Wilh. Volkmar, Der Mystiker Heinr. Suso (Gymn.-Progr.), 
Duisburg, 1869. 

A list of editions of the opuscule, entitled Hine deutsche Theologie (first published in part by Lu- 
ther, 1516) is given in the edition of F. Pfeiffer, Stuttgard, 1851, 2d edition, with modern German trans- 
lation, Stuttgard, 1855 (Preface, pp. 10-18). Cf. Ullmann, Theol. Stud. uw. Krié., 1852, p. 859 seq. ; Lisco, 
Die Heilslehre der Theologia deutsch, Stuttgard, 1857; Reifenrath, Die dewtsche Theologie des Franck- 
Surter Gottesfreundes, Halle, 1863. 

Rusbroek Opp. latine, ed. Surius, Cologne, 1552, ete., in German, by Gottfr. Arnold, Offenbach, 1701. 
Vier Schriften R.s, published in low German by A. v. Arnswaldt, Hanover, 1848. Werken van Jan van 
Ruusbroec, Ghent, 1858 seq., 5 parts. Cf. Engelhardt, Rich. v. St. Victor αἰ. R., Erlang., 1888 (see above, 
p. 389); Ch. Schmidt, Htude sur Jean F., Strasburg, 1859. 

Of the remaining exceedingly copious literature of the School of German Mystics founded by Eck- 
hart, only fragments are extant, in part still unprinted. Cf. Wackernagel (see above) and Bach. Meister 
Eckhart, pp. 115-207. Yet important as these works were in their influence on the development of German 
prose and on the religious life of the German people, they were without any special importance for the 
progress of science. One of the most important of them, for the most part compiled from Eckhart, is found 
translated in Greith’s Die deutsche Mystik im Predigerorden, pp. 96-202. 


The characteristic spirit of German Mysticism appears, at least in germ, in the works 
of David of Augsburg, the Franciscan monk (died 1271—on him ef. Pfeiffer’s Deutsche 
Mystiker, Vol. I. p. xxvi. seq. and pp. 309-386), and particularly in those of Albertus 








GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 471 


Magnus. Eckhart, born after 1250, perhaps at Strasburg, entered the Dominican Order, 
and was possibly an immediate pupil of Albert. He studied and taught afterward at 
Paris, but was summoned in 1302—hence before the arrival in Paris of Duns Scotus—by 
Bonifacius VIII. to Rome, and made a doctor (‘‘ doctorem ipse inauguravit,” Quétif et Echard, 
Script. Ord. Praed., Vol. I. f.507). E. held positions of high dignity in his order. In 1304 
he became its Provincial for Saxony, and in 1307 its General Vicar, commissioned to 
reform the convents of the Order in Bohemia. He taught and preached in many parts of 
Germany with the greatest éclat. Having been perhaps even before then removed from his 
offices, he was brought in 1327 before a tribunal of the Inquisition at Cologne. He 
recanted conditionally (siqguid errorum repertum fuerit, . . . hic revoco publice), but appealed, 
in reply to further requisitions, to the Pope. He died before the bull condemning twenty- 
eight of his doctrines was published (March 27, 1329). 

The youth of Eckhart fell in a time of active scientific conflicts. In 1270 and 1277 the 
Archbishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, was compelled to take steps against a wide-spread 
rationalism, which, setting out from the traditional distinction between revealed truths and 
truths of the reason, affirmed that only that which was scientifically demonstrable could be 
accepted as true, and consequently that all dogmas peculiar to Christianity were untrue (ef. 
above, p. 460). To this were added the manifold pantheistic and antinomian heresies of that 
age. It was with reference, not only to all these, but also, at a later epoch, with refer- 
ence to the doctrines of Duns Scotus and the Nominalists, that Eckhart found it necessary 
to define his position. On the basis of the principles of Albert and Thomas, he went on to 
add to the superstructure which they had erected, and carried their philosophy of the 
intellect to the point of affirming that all religious truth lay within the sphere of human 
reason. But while he sought to penetrate religious truth with the eye of knowledge, he 
unconsciously foisted on it an interpretation of his own, treating the doctrines of the 
Church as a symbolical, representative expression of the truth, while he believed himself to 
possess, in the form of adequate conceptions, the full truth. Eckhart placed in the fore- 
ground of his theology the Neo-Platonic elements, derived particularly from the Pseudo- 
Areopagite, but also present in Albert and Thomas, while at the same time, by studying 
the writings of the Apostle Paul and of Augustine, he succeeded in giving to Ethics a more 
profound basis. The nature of his speculations was essentially influenced by the fact that 
he regarded himself as a servant rather of Christian truth than of the Church. Isolated 
expressions in his writings respecting the abuses of the Church are not so important a 
confirmation of this fact, as is the ingenuousness which everywhere characterizes him when 
maintaining conceptions of Christian doctrine which were in diametrical opposition to the 
teaching of the Romish Church. Thus he addressed himself above all to the Christian 
people, not to the schools, and viewed scientific knowledge chiefly with an eye for its 
morally edifying power. Eckhart did not intend to oppose either the Church or Scholas- 
ticism, but in reality he tore himself loose from their ground. At first, only the relative 
importance assigned to particular elements of doctrine was changed by him, the latter 
being liberated from the narrow spaces of the School and arranged to meet the needs of 
the Christian people; afterward, the character of the doctrines was transformed, and much 
that had been concealed under Scholastic formulas appeared as the proper consequence of 
the Scholastic doctrine. Scholasticism had for its object the advancement of the Church 
and its doctrine; Eckhart aimed to promote the spiritual welfare of Christians and to point 
out the nearest way to union with God. Hence his indifference and even hostility to the 
purely ecclesiastical and dialectical elements of the philosophy of the Schools wherever, 
instead of proposing the shorter and true way to God, they seemed to interpose an endless 
series of artificial and false conditions. 


472 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


We find no questions of a purely logical nature discussed by Eckhart. But the univer- 
sal is for him that which truly exists; in order to become active, it needs the individual, 
which on its part receives being and permanence from the universal, and can only through 
its immanence in the universal assert itself as real and permanent (cf., 6. g., Pfeiffer, Vol. 
IL, p. 632, line 30; 250, 16; 419, 24). 

The chief points in his doctrine are indicated by Eckhart himself, on p. 91: he was 
accustomed, he says, to speak of “decease,” of the building up anew of the soul in God, 
of the high nobility of the soul, and of the purity of the divine nature. The exposition of 
his doctrine must begin with his psychology, which includes the source of all his con- 
ceptions. 

I. Eckhart’s psychology agrees most nearly with that of Augustine and Thomas. The 
soul is immaterial, the simple form of the body, entire and undivided in every part of the 
body. The faculties of the soul are the external senses, and the lower and higher 
faculties. The lower faculties are the empirical understanding (Bescheidenheit), the heart 
(organ of passion), and the appetitive faculty; the higher faculties are memory, reason, and 
will, corresponding with Father, Son, and Spirit. The senses are subordinate to the per- 
ceptive faculty or the common sense; by the latter that which is perceived is handed over 
to the understanding and memory, having been first stripped of its sensuous and material 
element and the manifold in it having been transformed into unity. Sensuous perception 
takes place by the aid of images of the objects which are taken up into the soul. Regu- 
lated by the appetitive faculty, and purified and freed by the reflective intellect from all 
that is merely symwbolical or figurative, the representative object of perception reaches the 
region of the highest faculties (p. 319 seq.; 538; 383 seq.). The soul is uot subject to the 
conditions of space and time; all its ideas are immaterial (p. 325); it acts in time, but not 
temporally (p. 25). Regarding only its highest faculties in their supra-sensuous activity, 
we call the soul spirit; but as the vitalizing principle of material bodies, it is called soul. 
Yet both are one essence. All activity of the soul (in the narrower sense) depends on the 
presence of organs. But the organs are not themselves the essence of the soul; they are 
an outcome of its essence, although a degenerate outcome. In the profoundest recesses 
of the soul these organs cease, and consequently all activity ceases. Nothing but God the 
Creator penetrates these recesses. The creature can know only the faculties in which it 
beholds its own image. The soul has thus a double face, the one turned toward this 
world and toward the body, which the soul fits for all its activity, the other directed 
immediately to God. The soul is something intermediate between God and created things 
(pp. 110, 250, 170). (Cf. Greith, pp. 96-120). 

The highest activity of the soul is that of cognition. This is represented by EH. as an 
act in which all plurality and materiality are eliminated more or less forcibly, according to 
the kind of cognition. There are three species of cognition: sensible, rational, and supra- 
rational cognition; only the last reaches the whole truth. Whatever can be expressed in 
words is comprehended by the lower faculties; but the higher ones are not satisfied with 
so little. They constantly press further on, till they reach the source whence the soul 
originally flowed forth. The highest faculty is not, like each of the inferior faculties, one 
faculty among others; it is the soul itself in its totality; as such it is called the ‘‘spark,” 
also (p. 113) Synteresis (corresponding to the soul-centre of Plotinus, cf. above, pp. 250, 251). 
This highest faculty is served by all the faculties of the soul, which assist it to reach the 
source of the soul, by raising the latter out of the sphere of inferior things (p. 131; 469). 
The spark is content with nothing created or divided; it aspires to the absolute, to that 
unity outside of which there remains nothing. 

Reason is the head of the soul, and knowledge is the ground of blessedness. Essence 








GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 473 


and knowledge are one. Of that which has most essence there is the most cognition. To 
know an object is to become really one with it. God’s knowing and my knowing are one; 
true union with God takes place in cognition. Hence knowledge is the foundation of all 
essence, the ground of love, the determining power of the will. Only reason is accessible 
to the divine light (pp. 99, 84, 221). But the knowledge here referred to is something 
supra-sensible, inexpressible in words, unaided by the understanding; it is a supernatural 
vision above space and time, and is not man’s own deed, but God’s action in him. (By 
Suso, in his “ Book Third,” chap. 6, true knowledge is defined as the comprehension of 
two contraries united in one subject.) Hence it is also a non-cognition, a state of blind- 
ness, of not knowing. But in respect of form it remains a cognition, and all finite cog- 
nition is an active progress toward infinite cognition. Hence the first requirement is: 
grow in knowledge. But if this knowledge is too high for you, believe; believe in Christ, 
follow his holy image and be redeemed (p. 498). With right knowledge, all fancying, 
imagining and faith, all seeing through images and comparisons, all instruction by Scrip- 
ture, dogmas, and authorities cease; then no external witness, no arguments addressed 
to the understanding, are longer necessary (pp. 242, 245, 381, 302, 458). But since the 
truth is incomprehensible to the empirical understanding—so much so, that if it were 
capable of being comprehended and believed, it would not be truth (p. 206)—the knowl- 
edge of the truth, in contradistinction from perception and mere logically correct think- 
ing, is called faith (p. 567), with special reference to the fact that this relation of the 
soul to the supra-sensible (in the cognition of truth), springs up in the reason, but becomes 
operative in the will. When, in other words, the reason arrives at the limit of her power, 
there remains a transcendent sphere, which she cannot fathom. This she then reveals in 
the innermost recesses of the soul, where reason and will stand in living interchange, or in 
the will, and the will, illuminated by the divine light, plunges into a state of non-knowing 
and turns from all perishable light to the highest good, to God. Thus faith arises (pp. 102, 
171, 176, 384 seq., 439, 454-460, 521, 537, 559, 567, 591), an exaltation which, commencing 
with the understanding, takes possession of the whole soul and guides it into its highest 
perfection (cf. Greith’s work, p. 172 seq.). 

The highest object of cognition is not the three persons of the Godhead, for these are 
distinguished from each other; nor the unity of the three, for this unity has the world 
outside itself. Reason penetrates beyond all determinateness into the silent desert, into 
which no distinction has ever penetrated, and which is exalted motionless above all con- 
trast and all division (pp. 193, 281, 144). 

II. In his Theology Eckhart starts from the Areopagite’s negative theology (cf. above, 
Ῥ. 350). He resumes the distinction made by Gilbertus Porretanus between the Godhead 
and God (see above, p. 399), giving it a deeper signification, but presents the doctrine of 
the Trinity in the same form in which Thomas does. The Absolute is called, in Eckhart’s 
terminology, the Godhead, being distinguished from God. God is subject to generation 
and corruption; not so the Godhead. God works, the Godhead does not work.—Yet these 
terms are not always precisely discriminated. God (ὦ e., the Godhead), we are told, has 
no predicates and is above all understanding, incomprehensible, and inexpressible ; every 
predicate ascribed to him destroys the conception of God, and raises to the place of God 
an idol. The most abstract predicate is essence (being); but inasmuch as this too contains 
a certain determination, it also is denied of God. God is in so far a nothing, a not-God, 
not-spirit, not-person, not-image, and yet, as the negation of negation (p. 322), he is at the 
same time the unlimited “ Jn se,” the possibility to which no species of essence is wanting, 
in which every thing is (not one, but) unity (pp. 180, 268, 282, 320, 532, 540, 590, 5, 26, 46, 
59).—The Godhead as such cannot be revealed. It becomes manifest first in its persons 


414 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


(p. 320). The Absolute is at once absolute process. The Godhead is the beginning ad 
final goal of the whole series of essences which exist. It is in the latter capacity, or, it 
is there where every essence is not annihilated, but completed (7. 6., in the concrete uni- 
versal), that the Godhead comes to repose. The eternal Godhead, as the beginning and 
end of all things, is concealed in absolute obscurity, being not only unknown and unknow- 
able to man, but also unknown to itself (p. 288). God, says Eckhart, improving upon 
Pseudo-Dionysius, dwells in the nothing of nothing which was before nothing (p. 539). 
But God does not stop there. God as Godhead is a spiritual substance, of which it can 
only be said that itis nothing. In the Trinity he is a living light that reveals itself (p. 499). 
In the Godhead the relation between essence and nature oscillates constantly between iden- 
tity and difference. In every object matter and form are to be distinguished (p. 530), with 
which correspond, in the Godhead, essence and the divine persons. The form of an object 
is that which the object is for others; it is the revealing element, and hence the persons of 
the Trinity are the form of the essence (p. 681). (In the school of Eckhart, as in that of 
Duns Scotus, form is the individualizing principle. Form gives separate essence, accord- 
ing to Suso in the ‘‘ Third Book,” ch. 4.) The persons of the Trinity are held together by 
the one divine nature common to them all, and this nature in the Godhead is the revealing 
principle in the same. The divine essence is the natura non naturata, the persons belong 
to the natura naturata; but the latter are no less eternal than is the former. The natura 
naturata is nothing but one God in three persons, and these endow the creature with its 
nature. The divine nature is the Father, if we disregard his distinction from the two 
other persons of the Godhead. The Father is as near to the natura non naturata as to 
the natura naturata. In the former he is alone, in the latter he is first (p. 537). The 
Father is contained in the unrevealed Godhead, but only as essence without personality, 
hence not yet as Father; it is only in self-knowledge that he becomes Father. He isa 
light which as person and essence is reflected in itself. The Father is the reason in the 
divine nature. There that which knows and that which is known are one and the same 
(pp. 499, 670). This being reflected in himself is the Father’s eternal activity. It is called 
begetting and speaking, and the object of the activity is called the Son or the Word, the 
second person in the divine nature. Sensuous nature works in space and time, in which, 
therefore, Father and Son are separated; in God there is no time or space, therefore Father 
and Son are at the same time one God, distinguished only as different aspects of one sub- 
stratum. The Father ‘‘ pours out” himself; himself, as thus “ poured out,” effused, is the 
Son (p. 94). The Son returns eternally back into the Father in love, which unites both. 
This love, the common will of the Father and the Son, is the Spirit, the third person. The 
Trinity flows from the one divine nature in an eternal process, and into the same divine 
nature it is eternally flowing back. While the Godhead thus really includes three persons, 
it is in the unity of the Godhead that absolute power resides. By virtue of this power, 
and not in his personal capacity, the Father begets the Son; it is only through this act of 
begetting that the Father becomes a person. This begetting is eternal and necessary, and 
is implied in the conception of the divine essence (p. 335). The divine nature is in itself 
neither essence nor person, but it makes the essence to be essence, and the Father, 
Father. The divine nature and the divine persons mutually imply each other; they are 
alike eternal and alike original, but in the former no distinction is possible, while the 
latter admit of distinction. The self-conservation of the Godhead in its peculiarity is the 
eternal process; the immovable repose of the Godhead finds in the eternal process its 
substratum. In the divine nature eternal rest is involved in eternal procession (pp. 682, 
677). In the absolute divine unity all difference is annulled, the eternal flux subsides into 
itself. The divine essence and the divine nature form only a relative opposition. If they 








GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 475 


were two determinations of the Absolute, the one must have sprung from the other; in 
the absolute unity they are one. The Absolute, as essence, is the essence of the divine 
persons and of all things; as nature it is the unity of the persons. Itis the essence of 
the divine essence, the nature of the divine nature (p. 669). The eternal process in God 
is the principle of eternal goodness and justice (p. 528). 

To the revealed God belong the divine predicates, and especially the predicate of reason. 
God’s life is his self-cognition. God must work and know himself. He is goodness and 
must communicate himself. His essence depends on his willing what is best. He works 
without a shade of temporality, unchangeable and immovable. He is love, but he loves 
only himself, and others in so far as he recognizes himself in them (pp. 11, 133, 134, 145, 
270, 272).— Eckhart repeats very often that God cannot be comprehended by the finite 
understanding; what we say of him we must stammer. But he attempts to communicate 
in the form of definite conceptions his own intuition, and to describe God as the absolute 
process. In this description the doctrine of the Church is not recognizable. The divine 
persons, as Eckhart conceives them, are in reality the stadia of a process. He has not 
succeeded in his attempted logical derivation of plurality in the Deity. Plurality and 
whatever else revelation asserts of the divine nature are, the rather, incorporated by him 
directly into his conception of the Absolute, and asserted as facts, but they are by no 
means metaphysically deduced. 

Ill. The Absolute is, further, the ground or cause of the world (p. 540 seq.). All 
things are from eternity in God, not indeed in gross material form, but as the work of art 
exists in the master. When God regarded himself, he saw the eternal images of all things 
prefigured in himself, not, however, in multiplicity, but as one image (p. 502). Eckhart 
follows Thomas in proclaiming the doctrine that there exists an eternal world of ideas 
(pp. 324-328). Distinct from this is the world of creatures, which was created in time 
and out of nothing. This distinction of two worlds must be kept in mind, in order not to 
impute to Eckhart a pantheism, which he was in fact far removed from holding (p. 325). 
The world was in the Father originally in uncreated simplicity. But at the moment of its first 
emergence out of God it took on manifoldness; and yet all manifoldness is simple in essence, 
and the independent existence of single objects is only apparent (p. 589). It is not that a 
new will arose in God. When the creature had as yet no existence for itself, it was yet 
eternally in God and in his reason. Creation is not a temporal act. God did not literally 
create heaven and earth, as we inadequately express it; for all creatures are spoken in the 
eternal Word (p. 488). In God there is no work; there all is one now, a becoming without 
becoming, change without change (p. 309). The now in which God made the world is the 
now in which I speak, and the day of judgment is as near to this now as is yesterday 
(p. 268). The Father uttered himself and all creatures in the Word, his Son, and the return 
of the Father into himself includes the like return of all creatures into the same eternal 
source. The logical genesis of the Son furnishes a type of all evolution or creation; the Son 
is the unity of all the works of God. God's goodness compelled him to create all that is 
created, with which he was eternally pregnant in his providence. The world is an inte- 
grant element in the conception of God; before the creatures were, God was not God 
(p. 281). This, however, is true only in relation to the ideal world, and so it can be said: 
God is in all things, and God is all things. Out of God there is nothing but nonentity. 
The world of things, in so far as these appear to assert their independence over against 
God, is therefore a nonentity. Whatever is deficient, whatever is sensuous in its nature, 
is the result of a falling off from essential being, a privation: all creatures are pure 
nothing. They have no essence, except so far as God is present in them. Manifoldness 
exists only for the finite intellect; in God is only one word, but to the human understanding 


476 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


there are two: God and creature (p. 207). Pure thought above time and space sees all things 
as one, and in this sense, but not when viewed with reference to their finite determinate- 
ness and diversity, all things are in God (pp. 311, 322 seq., 540) and have true being.— 
Eckhart does not attempt to explain the apparently independent existence of things. This 
appearance, he says, is connected with the genesis and existence of things in time (pp. 117, 
466, 390, 589); but whence the possibility of being, out of God? In one passage (p. 497) 
Eckhart accounts for the plurality of concrete existence by the fall of man; but evil itself 
and sin are left unexplained. Eckhart is aware of the subjectivity of thought (p. 484, line 
36); but that the false appearance in question has its source in human thought and is only 
subjective, is not his opinion. Not till a much later epoch was Eckhart’s speculation 
farther developed by attempts to comprehend the nature of evil and to demonstrate the 
subjectivity of thought. 

The relation of God to the world may be more precisely described as follows: God is 
the first cause of the world; in things God has externalized his innermost essence. Con- 
sequently he could never know himself if he did not know all creatures. If God were to 
withdraw what belongs to him, all things would fall back into their original nothingness. 
All things were made of nothing, but the Deity is infused into them. Nothingness is 
attached, in the form of finiteness and difference, to all that is created. God constrains all 
creatures to strive after likeness to him. God is in all things, not as a nature, nor ina 
personal form, but as their essence. Thus God is in all places, and he is present in every 
place with his entire essence. Since God is undivided, all things and all localities are 
places where God is. God communicates himself to all things, to each according to the 
measure of its ability to receive him. God is in all things as their intelligible principle; 
but by as much as he is in all things, by so much is he also above them. No creature can 
come in contact with God. In so far as God is in things, they work divinely and reveal God, 
but none of them can reveal him completely. Created things are a way leading either from 
God or to him. God so works all his works that they are immanent in him. The three 
persons of the Godhead have wrought their own images in all creatures, and ail things 
desire to return into their source. This return is the end of all motion in created things. 
The creature strives always for something better; the aim of all variation of form is 
improvement (pp. 333, 143). Repose in God is the ultimate end of all motion. 

The means for bringing all things back to God is the soul, the best of created things. 
God has made the soul like himself, and has communicated to it his entire essence. But 
that which exists in God by his essence does not thus exist in the soul, but is a gift of 
grace. The soul is not its own cause; while it is an efflux from the divine essence, it has 
not retained that essence, but has assumed another and a strange one. Hence it cannot 
resemble God in the form of its activities, but as God moves heaven and earth, so the soul 
vitalizes the body and imparts to it all its activities. At the same time, as being inde- 
pendent of the body, it can with its thoughts be elsewhere than in the body, as an infinite 
nature in the realm of finiteness (p. 394 seq.). All things were created for the soul. The 
reason, beginning with the activity of the senses, has power to take within its survey all 
creatures. All things are created in man. In the human reason they lose their finite 
limitations. But not only in thought does man ennoble all created things, but also by 
bodily assimilation in eating and drinking. Transformed into human nature, every crea- 
ture attains to eternity. Every creature is one man, whom God must love from eternity ; 
in Christ all creatures are one man, and this man is God. The soul never rests till it comes 
into God, who is its first Form, and all creatures never rest till they pass into human nature 
and through this into God, their first Form (pp. 152 seq., 530). Generation and growth 
end universally in degeneration (decay); our present temporal being ends in eterna} 








GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 477 


decay (p. 497). Thus the circle of the eternal process is run through, and things return to 
their center, the undeveloped, undisclosed Deity. It is the μονή, πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή of 
Proclus, which have entered by the way of Pseudo-Dionysius into Eckhart’s, as previously 
into Erigena’s speculation (cf. above, pp. 257, 350, and 358 seq.). 

IV. With the conception of the return of all things through the soul to God, the prin- 
ciple of Ethics is given to Eckhart. Morality is for him this restoration of the soul and 
with it of all things into the Absolute. The condition of this restoration is death to self 
t.e., the abolition of creatureship; its end is the union of man with God. It is particularly 
in the province of Ethics that Eckhart rendered important service. His speculation pene- 
trates, still more deeply than the rationalism of Abelard, into the very substance of 
morality. 

In order to bring back the soul to God, man is required to strip off all that pertains to 
the creature, and first of all in cognition. The soul is divided into faculties; each has its 
particular office, but the soul itself is only made so much the weaker for this division. 
Hence the necessity that the soul should gather itself together and pass from a divided life 
to a life of unity. God is not obliged to direct his attention from one thing to another, as 
we are. We must become as he is, and in an instant know all things in one image (pp. 13 
seq., 264). If thou wilt know God divinely, thy knowledge must be changed to igno- 
rance, to oblivion of thyself and of all creatures. This ignorance is synonymous with 
unlimited capacity for receiving. Thus all things become God for thee, for in them all 
thou thinkest and willest nothing but God alone. This is a state of passivity. God 
needs only that man should give him a quiet heart. God will accomplish this work him- 
self; let man only follow and not resist. Not the reason alone, but the will also, must 
transcend itself. Man must be silent, that God may speak. We must be passive, that 
God may work. The powers of the soul, which before were bound and imprisoned, must 
become unemployed and free. Man must thus let go, must give up his proper selfhood. Give 
up thine individuality and comprehend thyself in thine unmixed human nature, as thou art 
in God: thus God enters into thee. Couldst thou annihilate thyself for an instant, thou 
wouldst possess all that God is in himself. Individuality is mere accident, a nothing; put 
off this nothing, and all creatures are one. The One, that remains, is the Son, whom the 
Father begets(p.620). All the love of this world is built on self-love; hadst thou given up 
this, then thou hadst given up all the world. The man who will see God must become 
dead to himself and be buried in God, in the unrevealed and solitary Deity, in order again 
to become that which he was when he as yet was not. This state is called decease, a 
freedom from all passions, from one’s self, and even from God. The highest point is 
reached when man, for God’s sake, relinquishes God himself. This implies complete sub- 
mission to God’s will, joy in all sufferings, though they were the sufferings of hell, joy in 
the vision of God, as also in his absence. The ‘ deceased” man loves no particular good, 
but goodness for goodness’ sake; he does not comprehend God, in so far as God is good 
and just, but only in so far as he is pure substance. He has absolutely no will; he has 
entered completely into the will of God. Everything which comes between God and the 
soul must be removed; the end is not likeness, but unity. The soul, in being thus 
absorbed in God, enters at the same time into and dwells in the soul’s most proper essence, 
in the wilderness of the soul, where the soul must be robbed of itself and be God with God 
—ainto that negation of all determination in which the soul has eternally hovered without 
truly possessing itself (p. 510). The highest degree of ‘‘decease” is called poverty. A 
poor man is he who knows nothing, wills nothing, and has nothing. So long as man still 
has the will to fulfill God’s will, or desires God or eternity or any definite object, he is not 
yet truly poor, 7. e., not yet truly perfect (p. 280 seq.). 


478 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14rH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


If I am in the state of ‘‘decease,” God brings forth his Son in me. The sanctification 
of man is the birth of God in the soul. All moral action is nothing other than this bring- 
ing forth of the Son by the Father. (This language is found also in the Epistle to Diog- 
netus, see above, p. 280.) The birth of God in the soul takes place in the same way as 
the eternal birth of the Word, above time and space. In this work all men are one Son, 
different in respect of bodily birth, but in the eternal birth one, a sole emanation from 
the eternal Word (p. 157). At the same time it is I who bring forth the Son in my moral 
action. God has begotten me from eternity, that I may be Father and beget him who 
begat me. God’s Son is the soul’s son. God and the soul have one Son, namely, God. 
This birth of God in the soul is irreversible. He in whom the Son is once begotten can 
never fall again. It were a mortal sin and heresy to believe otherwise (pp. 652 and 10). 

From this principle are deduced the various doctrines of Ethics. Virtuous action is 
purposeless action. Not even the kingdom of heaven, salvation, and eternal life are legiti- 
mate objects of the moral will. As God is free from all finite ends, so also is the righteous 
man. Desire nothing, thus wilt thou obtain God and in him all things. Work for the sake 
of working, love for love’s sake; if heaven and hell did not exist, thou shouldst yet love 
God for the sake of his goodness. Still more: thou shalt not love even God because he is 
righteousness or because of any quality in him, but only in view of his likeness to himself. 
All that is contingent must be laid aside, including therefore virtue, in so far as it is a 
particular mode of action. Virtue must be a condition, my essential condition; I must be 
built up and built over into righteousness. No one loves virtue except him who is virtue 
itself. All virtues should become in me necessities, being performed unconsciously. 
Morality consists not in doing, but in being. Works do not sanctify us, we are to 
sanctify works. The moral man is not like a pupil, who learns to write by practice, 
giving attention to every letter, but like the ready writer, who, without attention, uncon- 
sciously exercises, perfectly and without labor, the art which has become to him a 
second nature (pp. 524, 546, 549, 571). All virtues are one virtue. He who practices one 
virtue more than another is not moral. Love is the principle of all virtues. Love strives 
after the good. It is nothing other than God himself. Next to love comes humility, which 
consists in ascribing all good, not to one’s self, bat to God.—The beauty of the soul is, that 
it be well-ordered (cf. Plotinus’ doctrine, above, § 68, p. 250). The lowest faculties of the 
soul must be subordinated to the highest, and the highest to God: the external senses must 
be subordinated to the internal senses, the latter to the understanding, the understanding 
to the reason, the reason to the will, and the will to unity, so that the soul may be “de- 
ceased’? and nothing but God may enter into it. 

It will be easily understood that Eckhart places a very low estimate on external works, 
such as fastings, vigils, and mortifications. The idea that salvation depends on them is 
declared to be a suggestion of the devil (p. 633). They are rather a hindrance than a 
help to salvation, if one depends on them. They are appointed to prepare the spirit to turn 
back into itself and into God, and to draw it away from earthly things; but lay on the spirit 
the curb of love, and thou wilt reach the goal far better (p. 29). No work is done for its 
own sake; in itself a work is neither good nor bad; only the spirit, from which the work 
proceeds, deserves these predicates. Nothing has life, except that which originates its 
motion from within. All works, therefore, which arise from an external motive are dead 
in themselves. The will alone gives value to works, and it suffices in place of them. The 
will is almighty; that which I earnestly will I have. No one but thyself can hinder thee. 
The true workmg is a purely interior working of the spirit on itself, 7. ¢., of the spirit in 
God or upon God’s motion. Even works of compassion, done for God’s sake, have the 
same disadvantage which belongs to all external aims and cares. Such works make of the 





" 


GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 479 


soul, not a free daughter, but a serving-maid (pp. 71, 353, 402, 453 seq.). The inner work 
is infinite, and takes place above space and time; none can hinder it. God does not 
demand external works, that depend for their execution on space and time, that are hmited, 
that can be hindered or forced, and that grow wearisome and old with time and repetition. 
Just as the liberty of falling can be taken away from the stone, but not the inclination to 
fall, so with the inner work of morality, which is to will and to incline toward all good and 
to strive against evil (p.434). The action of the righteous is not legality, but a life of faith 
(p. 439). The true inner work is an independent rising of the reason to God, not through 
the aid of definite rational conceptions, but in simple immediate unity with God (p. 43). 
So also true prayer is the knowledge of the absolute essence. The prayer of the lips is 
only an outward practice, ordained for the assembly. True prayer 1s voiceless, a working 
in God and a giving up of ourselves to God’s working in us, and so men should pray with- 
out ceasing in all times and places. Thou needest not to tell God what thou hast need of; 
he knows it all beforehand. Let him who would pray aright ask for nothing but God 
alone. If I pray for anything, I pray for that which is nothing. He who prays for any- 
thing besides God prays for an idol. Hence complete resignation to God’s will belongs to 
prayer. The ‘‘deceased” man does not pray; for every prayer is for some definite object, 
but the heart of the “deceased” craves nothing. God is not moved by our prayers. But 
God has foreseen all things from eternity, including, therefore, our prayers, and he has from 
eternity granted or refused them (pp. 240, 352 seq., 487, 610). 

There are no degrees in virtue. Those who are increasing in it are as yet not moral at 
all (pp. 80, 140). Complete sanctification is attainable. Man can surpass all the saints in 
heaven and even the angels. Even in his present body he can arrive at the state in which 
it is impossible for him to sin (p. 460). Then light streams through the body itself, all the 
powers of the soul are harmoniously ordered, and the entire outward man becomes an 
obedient servant of the sanctified will. Then man does not need God, for he has God. His 
blessedness and God’s blessedness are one. 

Eckhart avoids with great discreetness the quietistic and antinomian consequences that 
seem to follow from such conceptions as his, and which in the contemporaneous fanaticism 
of the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, based on the doctrine of Amalrich of Bena, 
appeared in such glaring colors. <A state of transcendent union with God by no means 
hinders a temporal and rational occupation with empirical things. The freedom from Jaw 
and from all activity, which is above described, belongs, according to Eckhart, only to the 
“little spark,” but not to the faculties of the soul. Only the ‘‘little spark” of the soul is 
to be at all times with God and united with God, but thereby are desire, action, and feeling, 
all to be determined (pp. 22, 385, 161, 514). Man cannot continue without interruption in 
that highest state termed above “ poverty; ” otherwise all communion of the soul with the 
body would cease. God is not a destroyer of nature; he completes it, and enters with his 
grace where nature achieves her highest works (pp. 18, 78). In this life no man can or 
ought to become free from passions, provided only that the excitement of the lower instincts 
be not allowed to disturb the reason, and that nothing strange or unfitting shall penetrate 
into the highest part of the soul (pp. 52 seq., 489, 666-668). No contemplation without 
working; mere contemplation were selfishness. The still work of reason is not prejudiced 
by external activity with the numerous faculties and conditions therein involved. That 
which the reason comprehends as One and out of time, the faculties translate into temporal 
and spatial definiteness. If a man were in an ecstasy, like St. Paul, and knew of a poor 
man who had need of a little pottage, it were better that he should leave his ecstasy and 
minister to the needy (pp. 18-21, 330, 554, 607). So far is it from being true that works 
cease when sanctification is attained, that it is not until after one’s sanctification that right 


480 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


activity, love to all creatures, and most of all to one’s enemies, and peace with all, begm. 
Kestasies are soon over, but union with God becomes an abiding possession of the soul, 
even when, in the midst of the soul’s outward activity, that union seems to be withdrawn. 
The outward works of mercy are indeed not done on their own account; they have an end 
where there is no sorrow nor poverty, in eternity, while the discipline of the inner man, 
from which they arise, begins here and endures eternally (p. 329 seq.). A man can relin- 
guish himself and still—and then only with full right—retain temporal goods. He can 
enjoy all things; no natural sensation is unworthy of him. We should destroy no smaller 
good in us, in order to secure a greater one, nor should we give up any mode of activity 
that is of limited goodness for the sake of a greater good ; but we should comprehend every 
good in its highest sense, for no good conflicts with another (pp. 427, 473, 492, 545, 573). 
Only the principle is important; from the right principle flow right actions as a matter of 
course (p. 179). Many people say: If I have God and his love, I can do what I will. They 
must be careful rightly to understand the case. So long as thou hast power to do anything 
which is against God’s: will, thou hast not God’s love (p. 232). Do that to which thou 
feelest thyself most impelled by God. That which is one man’s life is often another's death. 
All men are by no means required by God to follow the same way. God has not made man’s 
salvation dependent on a particular form of activity. If thou findest that the nearest way 
for thee to God consists not in many works and outward labors and deprivations—which 
are not of great importance unless one feels himself peculiarly moved toward them and has 
power to do and undergo them without confusion in his inward life—if, then, thou findest 
this not in thee, be entirely at peace and care but little for it. Also follow Christ spirit- 
ually. Wouldst thou fast forty days because Christ did so? Nay, follow him only in this, 
that thou perceivest to what he draws thee most, and then practice renunciation. That 
were a weak inward life which should depend on its outward garb; the inner must deter- 
mine the outer. Therefore those may with perfect right eat who would be quite as ready 
to fast. Torment not thyself; if God lays sufferings on thee, bear them. If he gives thee 
honor and fortune, bear them with no less readiness. One man cannot do all things; he 
must do some one thing; but in this one he can comprehend all things. If the obstacle is 
not in thee, thou canst as well have God present with thee by the fire or in the stall as in 
devout prayer. Be not satisfied with a God whom thou only conceivest in thought. If 
thought perishes, so perishes thy God. Thou mayst by faith arrive at the state in which 
thou shalt have God essentially dwelling in thee, and thou shalt be in God and God in 
thee (pp. 543-578). 

V. Since God accomplishes the process of his own redintegration from a state of self- 
alienation by means of the soul, it follows that God needs the soul. He lies constantly in 
wait for us, that he may draw us into himself. For this end he works all his works. God 
can as little do without us as we without him. This eternal process in God is his grace. 
God’s grace works supernaturally and in a manner that transcends reason; it is unmerited, 
eternally predestinated, but does not destroy our freedom of will. Nature makes no leaps; 
she commences with the least, and works steadily forward till she reaches the highest. 
God’s action does not conflict with man’s free-will. The work of grace is nothing else than 
a revelation of God, a revelation of himself for himself in the soul (p. 678). Grace begins 
with the conversion of the will, which conversion is at once a new creation out of nothing. 
It effects in man, not a course of action, but a condition, an indwelling of the soul in God— 
Concerning the relation of grace to free will, Eckhart expresses himself in an uncertain 
Taanner. 

By grace man regains the complete union with God, which he had originally. The soul, 
like all things, pre-existed in God. Then I was in God, not as this individual man, but as 

















GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND [ὕτη CENTURIES. 481 


God, free and unconditioned like him. Then there were no real differences in God. Im- 
manent in the divine essence, I created the world and myself. By my emanation from him 
into individual existence I gave God his divine nature (his Godship), and do give it him 
constantly ; for I give him that possibility of communicating himself which constitutes his 
essence. God can only understand himself through the human soul; in so far as I am 
immanent in the essence of the Deity, he works all his works through me, and whatever is 
an object of the divine understanding, that am I (pp. 581-583, 614, 281-284). If I return 
out of my finite form of existence into God, I receive an impulse that bears me above the 
angels and makes me one with God. Then I am again what I was; I neither increase nor 
decrease, but remain an immovable cause, that moves ull things. This breaking through 
and out from the limitations of creatureship is the end of all existence and of all change. 
God became man that I might become God. I become one body with Christ and one spirit 
with God. I comprehend myself no otherwise than as a son of God, and draw all things 
after me into the uncreated good (pp. 511, 584). But the soul is nevertheless not anni- 
hilated in God. There remains a little point in which the soul continues to show itself a 
creature, in distinction from the Deity, namely, in this: that itis unable to fathom the depths 
of the Godhead. Complete annihilation of the soul in God is not its highest end. We 
become God by grace, as God is God by nature. This state is also called a deitfication of 
man (the θέωσις of Dionysius and Maximus—see above, p. 352—and of Erigena, see above, 
pp. 358, 362 seq.), and not only is the soul affected by this change, but the body also 
becomes transfigured, freed from the senses (pp. 128, 185, 303, 377, 465, 523, 533, 662). 

The relation of evil to the absolute process is not clearly explained by Eckhart. It was 
impossible that this should be otherwise, since Eckhart, like his predecessors, conceded to 
evi! only the character of privation. As denoting a necessary stadium in the return of the 
soul into God, evil is sometimes represented by Eckhart as a part of the divine plan of the 
universe, as a calamity decreed by God. All things, sin included, work together for good 
for those that are good (p. 556). God ordains sin for man and for those, most of all, whom 
he has chosen for great things. For this, also, man should be thankful. He should not 
wish that he had not sinned. By sin man is humiliated, and by forgiveness he is all the 
more intimately united to God. Nor should he wish that there might be no temptation to 
sin, for then the merit of combat and virtue itself would no longer be possible (pp. 426, 
552, 557). Regarded from a higher stand-point, evil is not evil, but only a means for the 
realization of the eternal end of the world (pp. 111, 327, 559). God could do no greater 
harm to the sinner than to permit or predestine him to be sinful and then not send upon him 
suffering sufficiently great to break his wicked will (p. 277). God is not angry at sin, as 
though in it he had received an affront, but at the loss of our happiness, 7. ¢., he is angry 
only at the thwarting of his plan in regard to us (p. 54). To the permanent essence of the 
spirit sin is external only. Even after the commission of mortal sins the spirit retains in 
its essence its likeness to God; even then good works may arise from the eternal basis of 
the soul, the fruit of which remains in the spirit and, if the latter is received to grace, 
redound to its furtherance (pp. 71-74, 218).—Yet Eckhart also teaches the Church doctrine 
of original sin. Adam's fall really disturbed the divine plan of the world, and not only 
brought disorder into the nature of man, which was before free from all weakness and 
morally perfect, and rendered man mortal, but also introduced confusion into all external 
nature (pp. 368, 497, 658), and sin has since become the nature of all (pp. 370, 433, 529, 
line 26). 

Eckhart distinguishes between and teaches both an eternal and a temporal incarnation, 
and makes abundant exertions to render the latter conceivable. He first discriminates care- 
fully in Christ between the man and the God, and then teaches that these elements were 


482 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


united in one person. Christ’s person was eternally present in God as the second person 
of the Trinity. He assumed not the nature of a particular man, but humanity itself, which 
subsisted as an idea eternally in God. Hence, as Eckhart asserts with Maximus, in oppo- 
sition to Thomas, God would have become man, even if Adam had not fallen. Not Adam, 
therefore, but Christ, is the first man whom God created; for when God created man, it was 
the future Christ that God had in mind (pp. 158, 250, 591). Christ was born as a man by 
a miracle at a definite moment of time, while at the same time he abides eternally in God. 
His body was derived from Mary, his spirit was created by God out of nothing; to the 
body as well as the spirit God communicated himself. The human and divine natures are 
united in Christ, but mediately and in such manner that each continues to subsist in its 
pecuharity; his person is the common substratum and bond of union of the two natures 
(pp. 674, 677). Between Christ as creature and the eternal Word the distinction must be 
carefully maintained. Christ’s soul was in itself a creature: divinity was communicated to 
him in a supernatural manner after his creation. After Adam’s fall it was necessary that 
all creatures should labor to bring forth a man who should restore them to their original 
glory (p. 497). By nature Christ’s soul was like that of any other man; by moral exertion 
Christ raised himself into the immediate vicinage of God, as I also can do through him 
(p. 397). His soul is the wisest that ever existed. It turned in the creature to the 
Creator, and therefore God endowed it with divine attributes. Christ’s created soul never 
completely fathomed the Deity. In his youth he was simple and unknowing, like any other 
child; during all his life on earth his unity with God was withdrawn, so that he had not the 
full intuition of the divine nature. In heaven the soul of Christ still remains a creature and 
is limited by the conditions of creatureship (pp. 535, 674). But the unequalled degree of 
moral elevation in him was due to an unparalleled working of divine grace. When Christ 
was created his body and soul were united in one moment with the eternal Word. In his 
deepest sufferings he remained united with the highest good in the highest faculty of his 
soul. But his body was mortal, and in his senses, his body, and his understanding, he was 
subject to suffering. His union with God was so powerful that he could never, for an 
instant turn away from God, and the origin and end of all his actions was to be found in 
his own essence—they were free, unconditioned, and emptied of all finite ends (pp. 292, 
293, 583). Christ’s sitting at the right hand of the Father signifies his exaltation above 
time into the rest of Deity, to which also those who are risen with Christ shall attain (p. 116 
seq.). Thus Christ is our pattern. If we can, like him, become not one man, but humanity, 
we shall receive by grace all that Christ had by nature.—Of the theory of satisfaction 
slight traces only are found in Eckhart, and these only such as were suggested by linguistic 
usage. Christ is the Redeemer by his moral merit. Through God’s assumption of the 
human nature, the latter has been ennobled, and I attain this nobility in so far as I am in 
Christ and realize in myself the idea of humanity (pp. 64, 65). Christ has proved to us the 
blessedness of sufferifg ; redemption through his blood is with Eckhart only another ex- 
pression for the sanctifying, typical power of his sufferings (pp. 452, 184). By his perfect per- 
formance of duty ho earned a reward, in which we all participate, so far as we are one with 
him (p. 644). Hence his mortal body deserves no worship ; every moral soul is nobler than 
it (p. 397). The consideration of Christ’s appearance as a man is but a preliminary step ; 
even to the disciples Christ’s bodily presence was a hindrance. We must follow and seek 
after the humanity of Christ till we apprehend his deity. Thinking much of the man Jesus, 
of his bodily appearance and his suffering, is viewed by Eckhart as the source of a false 
emotion and a sentimental devotion without moral power and clear knowledge (pp. 241, 
247. 636, 658). Mary is blessed, not because she bore Christ bodily, but because she bore 
him spiritually, and in this every one can become like her (pp. 285, 345-347). In a similar 





GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 483 


manner Eckhart judges concerning the sacraments, even when he is insisting most strongly 
on the orthodox doctrine. The Eucharist may indeed be the greatest gift of God to 
aumanity; still, it is greater blessedness to have God spiritually born in us than to be 
united corporeally with Christ. For him who should be spiritually well prepared for it 
every meal would become a sacrament. Sacrament means sign. He who adheres con- 
stantly to the sign alone comes not to the inward truth to which the sign merely points 
(pp. 568, 239, 396, 593).—Until death it is possible to advance in sanctification, but not 
afterward. The state in which one is at his death remains his state forever (p. 639). 
Hell is a condition; it is existing in nothingness, in alienation from God. For those 
who are converted shortly before dying a purgatory of temporary duration is given. 
At the judgment-day it is not God that pronounces judgment, but man who passes 
sentence upon himself; as he then appears in his essence, so shall he remain eternally. 
At the regurrection the body receives and shares the essence of the soul; that which 
is raised is not the material body itself, but the ideal principle of the body (pp. 470- 
472, 522). 

Eckhart’s doctrine is an interpretation and in part a modification of the fundamental 
Christian dogmas, resting cn a bold metaphysical fundamental conception, the idea of the 
equality in essence of the soul with God. In his independent attitude with reference to 
ecclesiastical doctrine Eckhart was a forerunner of modern science. If later thinkers, on 
grounds of pure rational science alone, have striven against an agreement of philosophy 
with Christianity, Eckhart, setting out with what he believed to be a conception held by the 
Church, arrived at the doctrine of the absolute supremacy of the reason. The type of his 
character and teaching was derived from the innermost essence of the German national 
character, and in Germany the impulses which his doctrines gave to thought have never 
ceased to he operative, even when his name has been almost forgotten. Eckhart wished 
to edify, but by means of clear knowledge. With him the dogmatic lost its specific form, 
the historical its essential meaning; the motives of his doctrine, although dominated by a 
high ethical consciousness and a corresponding endeavor, were of a purely scientific 
nature, notwithstanding that the scientific form was relatively wanting. Eckhart does not 
linger at the stages in the elevation of the soul to God, like the representatives of Romanic 
Mysticism, but expends his force in the exposition of that which truly is, and of true 
knowledge. Thus he seeks to separate the pure idea contained in the doctrine of the 
Church and of his predecessors from all its integuments, as also to comprehend the doc- 
trines of the heretics in that aspect in which they are relatively justified. The mystical 
elements in Eckhart are his conception of the highest activity of the reason as immediate 
intellectual intuition, his denial of the being of all finite things, his demand that the indi- 
vidual self should be given up, and his doctrine of complete union with God as the supreme 
end of man. But his mysticism is not so much a matter of feeling as of thought, and this 
gives him that coolness and clearness which he seldom disowns. He does not shun the 
most extreme consequences; the paradoxical is rather sought than avoided, and the ever- 
enchaining, often fascinating, form of expression is carried to the extreme in its kind, in 
order to render it impressive and to make more manifest the contrast between the view 
presented and the more superficial view ordinarily taken. For this reason the expression 
is often more paradoxical than the thought, and Eckhart is careful to add the necessary. 
restrictions. In many points the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas approaches exceedingly near 
to that taught by Eckhart; but his attitude with reference to the Church and its doctrines 
does not permit him to strike out so far beyond all statutory limits into the pure ground 
of the religious consciousness. In so far the doctrine of Eckhart is a spiritualized Thomism. 
The Romanic Thomas became the highest scientific authority of the Romish Church, while 


454 GERMAN MYSTICISM IN THE 14TH AND 15TH CENTURIES. 


the doctrine of Eckhart, the German, prepared the way through its ethics for the Refor, 
mation, and through its metaphysics for later German speculation. 

The mystical school, which arose from Kckhart’s teaching, was divided into a heretical 
and a Church party. The former, called the “ false free spirits,” favored a wild and in its 
consequences immoral pantheism, while the latter sought to combine Hckhart’s doctrine in 
a modified form with personal piety. There followed a popular commotion, which affected 
large portions of the German people. Ancient heresies found a support in the doctrines 
of Eckhart. On the other hand, the widespread, retired community of the Friends of God 
{the name indicates the opposite of slaves of the law), whose peculiarity consisted in an 
extravagant feeling of the nearness of God, also found their chiefs mostly among the dis- 
ciples of Eckhart. The most important of Eckhart’s immediate disciples were the cele- 
brated preacher Johannes Tauler of Strasburg (1300-1361)—who combined, in his sermons 
and in his opuscule on the Imitation of the Poverty of Christ, impressive and morally 
edifying exhortation with the repetition of the speculative doctrines of Eckhart, and Hein- 
rich Suso, of Constance (1300-1365), the Minnesinger of the love of God, with whom the 
pious effusions of an extravagant fancy entered into singular union with Hekhart’s abstract 
speculations. Also the treatise from the fourteenth century by an unknown. author, which 
was discovered by Luther, and which, published under the title of “4 German Theology,” 
produced so great effects, is a substantially faithful reproduction of the fundamental ideas 
of Eckhart, although in parts the point of the original expression is blunted off. Though 
incited by the doctrines of Eckhart, John Rusbroek (1293-1381), Prior of the Convent of 
Grunthal, near Brussels, approached more nearly to the Romanie Mysticism, and taught, 
without going very deeply into ontological speculations, that the way to God was through 
contemplation. Yet he also became suspected, by Chancellor Gerson, of pantheism and 
of deifying the soul. None of the men named developed farther the doctrine of Eckhart 
in scientific form. With them the purely theoretical interest was inferior to the religious 
and ethical and practical; all of them fought against the wild outgrowths from Hekhart’s 
conceptions. They sought in particular to indicate more exactly the distinction between 
God and his creatures; they considered the union of the soul with God, not as a union of 
essence, but as one of will and of vision, and conceived faith more as a subjection of the 
understanding to authority, although unable to break loose themselves from Eckhart’s 
conception. Tauler and the “German Theology”? were most instrumental in perpetuating 
Eckhart’s speculation, while the ban of the Church rested with all its weight on Eck- 
hart’s memory and works. 

Later Mysticism, as it was developed among the Brothers of the Common Life (founded 
by the friend of Rusbroek, Gerhard Groot, died 1384), and especially by Thomas Hamer- 
ken of Kempen (died 1471, ‘‘ Of the Imitation of Christ”), and as, inspired from this source, 
it became in Johann Wessel’s writings (died 1489) a system of reformed theology, bears no 
Yonger the speculative character of the school of Eckhart. 


END OF VOL. IL 





SUP Lak ΜΒ Το 


TABLE, SHOWING THE Succession oF ScHoLaRcHS AT ATHENS. 


(Taken mostly from Zumpt, Ueber den Bestand der philosophischen Schulen in Athen und die 
Succession der Scholarchen, iu the Transactions of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for 
the year 1842, Berlin, 1844—-Phil. and Hist. Papers, pp. 27-119.) 


BEFORE CHRIST. 





PLATONISTS. ARISTOTELIANS. Storcs. EPICUREANS. 


Plato of Athens, 387 





to 347. 

Speusippus of Athens, 
347-339. 

Xenocrates of Chalce-| Aristotle of Stagirus, 
don, 329-314. 335-322. 

Polemo of Athens, | Theophrastus of Ere- | Zeno of Cittium, 308?-| Epicurus of Samos (of 
314-270. (With and} sus, 332-287. 258? Athenian descent), 
under him, Crantor.)| Strato of Lampsacus, 306-270. 

287-269. 

Crates of Athens,|Lyco of Troas, 269-|Cleanthes of Assos,| Hermarchus of Mity- 
270—? 226. 258?-? lene, 270-? 

Arcesilaus of Pitana in Hieronymus the} (Herillus of Carthage 
Aéolis, from—241? Rhodian. and Aristo of Chios.) | Polystratus. 

Hippoclides. 

Lacydes of Cyrene, |? Praxiphanes. Chrysippus of Soli, } Dionysius. 
241-215. ? Prytanis. from-209 ? 

Telecles and Evander, | Aristo of Iulis in the 
215 —? island of Kéwe, 226 -? 

Hegesinus of Perga-|? Aristo of Cos. 
mum, ? —? ? Lyciscus. Zeno of Tarsus, 209-- | Basilides. 

? Phormio. Diogenes the Babylo-|? Protarchus of Bar- 


Carneades of Cyrene,|Critolaus of Phaselis} nian, from Seleucia gylia in Caria. 
from—129? (in| in Lycia (in Rome,} on the Tigris (in 

Rome, 155.) 155). Rome, 155). 
Clitomachus (Asdru- Antipater of Tarsus. |? Demetrius Lacon. 
bal) of Carthage, | Diodorus of Tyre (till| Panetius of Rhodes|? Diogenes of Tarsus. 
129-109. after 110). (till about 111). 


480 THE SUCCESSION OF SCHOLARCHS AT ATHENS. 











BEFORE CHRIST. 





PLATONISTS. ARISTOTELIANS. Sroics.  EPICUREANS. 





? Charmadas. Erymneus. Mnesarchus(about| Apollodorus ὁ κῆπο- 
? Adschines of Naples. 110 to 90). τύραννος. 
Dardanus. 


Philo of Larissa (in 87 |? Athenio gine 


at Rome, where Ci- 
cero heard him). 


Antiochus of Askalon, 
832?—68? (Cicero 
heard him in the win- 
ter of 79-78.) 


Aristus of Askalon, 
68?-49? (teacher of 
M. Brutus, about 65.) 


Andronicus of Rhodes | Dionysius. 


(about 70, teacher of 


Boéthus of Sidon) | Antipater of Tyre. 


e va ’ ἣν - 
ἑνδέκατος ἀπὸ τοῦ 
᾿Αριστοτέλους. 


Theomnestus of|Cratippus of Mitylene 


Naucratis in Egypt 
(about 44). 


(about 44). 

? Xenarchus of Se- 
leucia in Cilicia 
(taught at Alexan- 
dria, Athens, and 
Rome). 


Zeno of Sidon (about 
90-78). 

(Cicero and Atticus 
his “hearers” in 19.) 

Pheedrus (from 78 to 
70teacherin Athens; 
previously, about 96, — 
a teacher of Cicero at 
Rome). 

Patron (70 till after 
51). (Contemporane- 
ously with him, Phi- 
lodemus of Gadara 
lived at Rome, and 
Syro taught in Rome 
and perhaps in Na- 
ples.) 


‘ 


we ee ne SS Oe ee ee 


PLATONISTS.” 


AFTER CHRIST. 


ARISTOTELIANS. 





Ammonius of Alexan- 
dria (under Nero and 
Vespasian, teacher 
of Plutarch). 

? Aristodemus of 
/Xgium (under Do- 
mitian and Trajan). 


Calvisius Taurus of 
Berytus or Tyre (in 


? Menephylus (toward 
the end of the first 
century). 

? Aspasius of Aphro- 
disias (about 120; 
Galenus heard one of 
his pupils in 145). 

? Adrastus of Aphro- 
disias. 


the times of Hadrian | Herminus. 


HEPICUREANS. 








“ὡ 


THE SUCCESSION OF SCHOLARCHS AT ATHENS. 48 





AFTER CHRIST. 





PLATONISTS. ARISTOTELIANS. Sroics. EPICUREANS. 





and Antoninus Pius; } Aristocles of Messene 
teacher of A. Gel-| in Sicily. 
lius). 

(Favorinus.) 

? Atticus (in the time | Alexander of Damas- 
of Marcus Aurelius| cus (about 176). 
Antoninus). Alexander of Aphro- 

disias (time of Septi- 
mus Severus, about 

Diodotus or Theodo-} 200). 


tus (about 230). Ammonius. Athenaus. 
Eubulus (about 265). | Ptolemzus. Musonius. 
(Longinus, teacher of Callietes (about 260). 


literature, lived till 


in Argolis (under 
Constantine the 
᾿ Great). 

? Euphrasius. 

? Chrysanthius of Sar- 
dis. 

Prisecus of Molossi 
(about 350-380). 

Plutarch of Athens, 
son of Nestorius (till 
433). Hierius and 
Asclepigenia. 

Syrianus of Alexan- 
dria, 433-450 ? 

Proclus, the Lycian, 
450 ?-485. 

Marinus of Sichem, 
485-? 
Together with him 
Zenodotus. 

Isidorus of Alexan- 
dria? —? 

Hegias ? -510? 

Damascius of Damas- 


273). 
? Theodorus of Asine 
cus, 520? -529. 














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